This article was downloaded by: [UNSW Library] On: 19 May 2015, At: 17:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20
THE PRAGMATICS OF EXPERTISE a
b
Vinciane Despret & Jocelyne Porcher a
Philosophie et Lettres, Université de Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium E-mail: b
143 rue Marc Rigal, C322, 34070 Montpellier, France E-mail: Published online: 18 May 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Vinciane Despret & Jocelyne Porcher (2015) THE PRAGMATICS OF EXPERTISE, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20:2, 91-99, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039845 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039845
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions
ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 20 number 2 june 2015
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
translator’s foreword “But, what’s this?” asks the writer Paul Marty, quoted in the book, “I saw cows with tears in their eyes?” Between this perception, and the reality of the tears, we find the play of the short book from which we have translated one of the chapters: Être bête, the title itself a pun playing between “being stupid” and “being a beast.” Knowledge is the issue in this ethological essay on research into agricultural animals, neglected “ordinary” farmyard animals like cows, pigs and goats, set in France of course. The knowledge trips across three levels and back again: what the philosophers/sociologists (Despret and Porcher) think they know with their theories and methods, what farmers know and narrate about their livestock, and what the animals themselves might know, what competences they might have and even what they feel. And the book poses the question at its simplest: “What is the difference between humans and animals?” then elaborates the question, not by staying at a philosophical level but by asking farmers what they think, and reflexively, what they think about the kinds of questions being asked. That is the focus of the chapter here translated, as it explains the model – which is how I have rendered the notorious word dispositif, on this occasion – for a pragmatic (interspecies) sociology for doing research with farmers and their animals, not about them. Thus we hear the farmers, throughout the book, elaborate their knowledges via interviews, especially on questions of work, and animals’ competences: “Recognizing Competences” is chapter 1, followed by 2, “Offers of
vinciane despret jocelyne porcher translated by stephen muecke THE PRAGMATICS OF EXPERTISE Subjectivity,” then 3, “Exchanges of Properties and Sharing of Worlds,” then this chapter, the methodological one, and finally the Conclusion, which reiterates that the book is about the “co-evolution” of humans forged as “beings for animals” and animals as “beings for humans,” a co-evolution which “farming extends and makes perceptible” (124). When experience is accompanied by the awareness of what it “does” and what it “transforms” (or what it “creates,” as in art), new conditions are thus produced that themselves become objects of interest, and which can eventually lead to new, specific, problematic situations, on the basis that they henceforth become part of the contextual conditions in relation to which the
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/15/020091-9 © 2015 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039845
91
the pragmatics of expertise researcher develops his or her aptitudes, desires, knowledges or science. Zask, “La Politique comme experimentation” 18
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
W
ould we have obtained the same answers, followed the same path, or bifurcated in the same manner if we had asked the question the way they traditionally do in research projects: “In your opinion, what is the difference between humans and animals?” We have touched on the first reason for the choice of this particular procedure that consisted in searching for the “right questions” and in delegating, to those we were addressing, the task of constructing them. We were not certain at any moment if our question had a meaning, nor if it represented an interest, nor even if it were relevant. We had even more reasons to adopt this procedure since the other question guiding our inquiry – the one interrogating the possibility that animals could take an active part in work – turned out to be even more problematic. Besides, it was in explaining the difficulties linked to this question, exactly as they were put at the end of the preceding inquiries, that we decided to take it on board: “During the research I undertook with farmers I (Jocelyne Porcher) often heard anecdotes, stories, even ways of talking which suggested that animals, in some way, collaborated in work. Now, when I tried to pursue this question with the farmers, head on, I was met with resistance or incomprehension. Clearly it’s not a good question to ask. But first-hand evidence kept coming up; this encouraged me to persevere. So, in your opinion, as a farmer, how do you think I should be framing my question so that it has a chance of being understood and being interesting?”1 These two questions, put like this, show how we have tried to reconstruct and modify the way traditional research is done. We have asked people to think with us. We have asked them to help us construct a problem and not to reveal situations or hand over information. Instead of the position of informant, conventionally applied in most inquiries, we have substituted a position that implies sharing, a
redistribution of expertise.2 We know that problems are not interesting unless they interest. So we should ask farmers raising stock to themselves construct the interest they might have in our own interrogations, even to the point (and this is the gamble we take) that we might hear it said that our problems are not interesting, relevant or subject to sharing. Or, to the point of hearing a response, like with André Louvigny: “Let me say, your question sounds a little weird,” or like Claude Baijot: “Strange questions you are asking.” In the end, and on the surface quite paradoxically, we ask for the maximum amount of indulgence for our research while at the same time creating the conditions for maximum “recalcitrance”:3 “Your question is not relevant.” The fact that a number of farmers, for example, might relocate the question of difference, by looking for other sites where it might seem more relevant, is receipt acknowledged, as far as we are concerned, for this offer of “recalcitrance.” This will to construct a space of “recalcitrance” and to maximize occasions likely to call for it comes in response to a difficulty in social scientific practice, a difficulty to which our earlier work has sensitized us.4 For the most part, these practices assume that the procedure for coming to know consists in gathering information, facts, opinions – even in the case of psychology studying reactions or behaviour. Now, this type of procedure keeps coming back to, keeps in existence, a radical asymmetry of expertise. There is, on the one hand, the “author-researcher” who creates the questions, interprets the hypotheses, constructs the problem; on the other hand there are those acting as social witnesses, informants, holders of opinions, beliefs and representations which the researcher will have the job of analysing. The fact that scientists, for example, refer to their colleagues by citing their names, while witnesses are all interrogated anonymously, is just one of the many ways of noting this asymmetry of expertise and of the possibility of being authorized to think and to be recognized as putting one’s thought to the test.5 The authors of theories, endowed with names, are cited; opinionholders are interchangeable and listed.
92
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
despret & porcher But the fact of having a name or not, being the creator of thought or of theories, or the simple representative of an opinion, is but the symptom of a more general situation characterizing certain habitual practices. They are based on a procedure which demands the submission of those it interrogates – submission to questions; submission to the inevitable play of interpretations that will come along to judge their depositions, their beliefs, even their unconscious motivations; submission to the theories guiding the research; submission to the problem being imposed on them and the way the researcher constructs and defines it. The subject is called upon by a problem that he or she often has nothing to do with, or at least nothing to do with the way it is defined, just as the researcher is most often not concerned with the way the problem can, or not, be a problem for the person called upon. And, for the most part, subjects thus mobilized will agree to respond to the questions without challenging their grounds, their relevance, or even their politeness,6 since it seems obvious enough that the scientist “knows better.” So our model [dispositif] had the aim of breaking with the habitual practices that banked on submission. We research the places where those we interrogate would be in a better position to “object”; we address ourselves to them in places where they would be “fully involved” and therefore where they would be interested and interesting. This is why, to each of our demands, we insist on using the phrase “you, as farmers.” Because this is where the real stakes of our proposition lie. It became a matter of addressing ourselves to those to whom we were submitting our questions at the sites where they were competent experts and where we were able to be confident in them. Our question, both formulated as a demand for “good questions” and addressed at what makes a person skilled in “objecting,” seemed to us able to keep the bet. And in fact it elicited in its very form the possibility for the farmers to actively contest our questions, even to doubt the relevance of the hypothesis that underpinned them: “Your question makes no sense,” or “That’s not the
93
way to put it,” even “That is not the main issue.” Yet none of our interlocutors left us empty-handed after having responded to our implicit request for contestation. They really helped us. They proposed a lot of questions that should allow us to explore the difference between human and animal. Of course, some of our interlocutors refused the suggestion to respond to a question with other questions, and took a short-cut: “I don’t know what has to be asked of farmers, but as for me, this is what I think of the difference between humans and animals.” But the large majority accepted the exercise. We had implicit help from Philippe Betton, who even encouraged us when we were investigating together how to formulate our question: “Exactly, by not presenting yourselves as coming from the milieu, from that milieu at all. You are tackling the subject from the outside. Since you know nothing and since the [industrial] farmers are in any case used to being asked questions that are, in inverted commas, ‘naı̈ve’, ‘ordinary’. If you ask them questions like that, naı̈ve ones … ” In this framework, one fact leaps out at us – the model creates work. The search for the right question ends up with lots of suggestions and hypotheses and leads the farmers to a genuine sociological exercise. They analyse the contrasts of different systems of farming and the different ways people have of organizing themselves with their animals, each of these different systems demanding, according to them, a different question. For instance, concerning the possibility of asking about animals’ work, Jean Rabat, on the pretext of getting the words right, starts work on a cartography of habits: “I have a little idea on this point. It all depends on the type of farmer you are dealing with. You have two categories. If you look at the organic people, there are in general a lot of peasants (in inverted commas) who have just started, people who did something else before, who came there and who therefore have completely different approaches. The usual peasant, coming from father to son, trained in agricultural school – where you aren’t trained but untrained, in such a way as you always do things the same way, reproduce
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
the pragmatics of expertise the same system. If you speak to them about behaviour, the word behaviour, it’s not a word they usually use.” He continues: “Go ahead, ask them: ‘When you are working with animals, do you have the feeling that they want to collaborate with what you want to make them do, or not?’ Because otherwise everyone of my age thinks about work back then when we put them in harness. That no longer happens; it’s all over.” Philippe Betton brings our semantic education to its conclusion by suggesting we avoid using the term competence because “it’s a word that is used for meanings other than the industrial, productivist raising of stock. I don’t think this term would be well received by the farmers. Perhaps you could use the word behaviour.” If you talk like that, you are not going to be understood. This is the posture of the expert in a country of diverse customs who teaches us the rules of “savoir-parler” and who, in the same movement, touches up in fine detail the map of social relations and conflicts. Patrick André, after having taken into consideration that our question on work, in fact, touches on what farmers expect of their animals in the relations that they have with them, suggests differentiating the latter as a function of our preferred approach. Would we like to compare what “cuts across all modes of production” or, on the contrary, do we want to “differentiate all the modes of production in order to make the fine distinction among all the approaches that might exist?” The expectations, he said, are certainly a transversal problem, but the forms they take can be different: “I’m not sure that a farmer who is in industrial agriculture expects the same thing of animals as a peasant who has a different approach in that he thinks he has to be in harmony with nature, while the former must rather adapt nature to himself.” We cannot fail to notice the way in which the farmer makes the question of expectations move around, creating an amazing similitude between our relationship to research and the relation of the farmers with their animals. You must specify what you expect from
your question, and know that it must vary in function with what the farmers expect of their animals. With them we learn about the practice of the “erotetic,” this felicitous term forged on the basis of the Greek eros which means love as well as lack, and which defines the art of questioning. A good question, according to some of our interlocutors, is not only one that is well addressed, in terms that can be shared, it is also an occasion which should lead the person being questioned to put themselves in question. It should elicit reflexivity, or at least make values explicit. A good question puts things to the test. “What I think,” says Jean Rabat, “is that you have to ask them if they think the animal is there to serve humans, to help humans get what they want done. So if you say to them, ‘get what you want done’ you are putting the question in terms of what they want for themselves. And that the animal is there to help them do it. And if the response is yes, they are going to say, ‘I use animals to make money,’ and that can take the question a bit deeper, asking themselves, ‘But how far would I go in making money out of animals?’ That might be one way of approaching the problem.” Patrick André takes up again his reflections he had at the beginning of our interview about work when he advised us to go via the problem of farmers’ expectations: “I think that one angle to approach [the question of difference] is exactly in asking the question, ‘what do we expect of animals?’ But is the door open enough to try to get a feel for the difference between humans and animals? With a crude question like that, I don’t think you’ll get much out of them.” Philippe Roucan takes another tack, to end up with a similar statement on the difficulty of the question: “How can you ask the farmer this question? Asking it is not rude. He finds it upsetting to be asked this question. At least, it is not that it’s upsetting, it irks him a little bit. Because for my part, let me tell you, there are not that many differences.” Eliciting recalcitrance also allows one to make things explicit, and therefore arguable, which is what we are after. In most human
94
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
despret & porcher science research a good part of the aims of the project remains hidden from the subjects, or those being researched. Scientists, in fact, have learned to fear the problem constituted by their expectations. If the sociologist or the psychologist reveals too clearly what they are looking for, the theory guiding their work, you can always suspect the subject to have replied by way of being “obliging” and thus to conform to the expectations of the interrogator. This is what leads us to think that if researchers in experimental psychology could for one moment imagine, as do farmers, that animals might have the intelligence to want to please, or to practise a preference for harmony, this would give them serious methodological problems.7 With humans, researchers have taken this possibility fully into account. Incidentally, to counter this difficulty, psychology has invented a technique of the lie and the trap, designed to hide what the researcher is really looking for, so as to avoid subjects being tempted to confirm the research hypothesis.8 More generally, to the extent that the research depends on people’s submission to what the researcher proposes, the problem of the influence of the latter’s expectations cannot be avoided. In asking farmers to both judge the relevance of our research and help us find the most “practicable”9 modes of access we have endowed expectations with a new status, which has made us much freer and much less worried about them. The fact of explaining them by opening wide the door onto any objection can benefit clear and active positioning on them. “What are you interested in?,” “How can I help you?” we have often been asked. Sometimes in the form of a quite recalcitrant hypothesis, as does Claude Baijot when he tells us: “I’m so sorry I am not able to reply to you,” and a little later specifies this by concluding: “You would have liked to have heard something else … ”; often helping us in the process. As when André Louvigny makes the suggestion: “I think that the word work is not well adapted to what you want to understand,” and later: “You need to perceive this human–animal relation in order to grasp what?” This leads us
95
to this paradox: our model is just as good at maximizing recalcitrance as indulgence. The prime effect of this model, if we were to sum it up, is a kind of translation in the form of what we might call a “call for expertise.” The “naivety” that Philippe Betton encouraged us to own up to – we don’t know how to ask the right questions – redistributes expertise and alters the asymmetry of positions. Above all, it has the effect of making (people) interested and interesting. A corollary consequence came up during the interviews, and everything above attests to it. Once the farmers made the question interesting, they wanted to answer it. And they do so. The answers nevertheless keep a certain emphasis as we formulate them; we addressed our questions to them “as farmers.” This emphasis, as we said, created a way of situating our interlocutors in a position in which they seemed to us to have the greater capacity to object. And other effects were also present. Our interlocutors have taken this invitation in two ways. First, “as a farmer” has been translated as “situated point of view” – I think as a farmer. Secondly, it has been able to indicate a privileged epistemic stance: “As a member of a collective who knows its mysteries, its functioning, its conflicts and issues … ” These two meanings are confirmed when farmers arrange for us to think about the difference (or the possibility of saying that animals work), in its relation to, for example, systems of production, to various limits and to everything that, from their point of view, can determine one conception or another. “There are,” Philippe Betton notes, “people who are very attuned to the well-being of animals and respect them, to the point of being vegetarians. The difference for me, as a farmer, that one must not lose sight of, in relation to whatever people who are very protective of animals might think, is that, well, they will be eaten [ … ] One must not lose sight of this, as a farmer. I think that all farmers are aware that this is about feeding people. So already, there’s your answer to what’s the difference between you and an animal. They will tell you that we are the ones eating them. That is the crudest response that
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
the pragmatics of expertise a farmer could give, the difference is that we are the ones raising them for food.” André Louvigny, on the other hand, contests the generality of this “as a farmer”: “Even at the heart of the community, there are farmers who are gentle and competent in their relations with animals and others who are brutal, idiots. So, there’s already a world. There are those who have no feelings for their animals. There are those who treat them well, and there are others who don’t get it. The opposite also goes, there are people who live for their animals and are crazy about them. Yes, who live more for their animals than their family, who neglect their family and their home.” Philippe Roucan comes to a similar conclusion. “What I call a farmer, you know what I mean, for us you’re a farmer, with the kind of farming you do, I mean a type of farming that you can call family, which is done on a small scale like us, with a limited number of animals, I mean I think that a farmer is not the same if he has a hundred head, or if he has ten thousand, because, as far as I’m concerned, he wouldn’t have the same perception of the animal.” Most of the statements that farmers make present a common characteristic; they are reflexive and contextualized. Each suggested we take their remarks as a function of their particular situation, their type of practice, the conditions, the animals, the quality of their relations, the fact that death was the fatal outcome for the life trajectory of both farmer and animal. And likewise, each could set up contrasts, saying, “Here you ought to ask this type of question, over there you have to speak differently.” It is in general the sociological researcher who fills in the gaps of the research in relating positions, beliefs or affirmations of those being interrogated to determinisms, contexts or situations. The fact of delegating this part of the work to the farmers provides a not insignificant advantage; it short-circuits any analysis in terms of unknown causes for the actors.10 The advantages of a so-called pragmatic sociology, which asks actors themselves to put into operation the analysis of why they are thinking the way they do, are considerable. Researchers are required to have better manners, because
they can no longer develop knowledge behind the back of those they are interrogating. The interrogated, for their part, can construct their analysis in all confidence.11 They will be invited to share all the more intelligence in that they have to take responsibility for the more interesting part of the work. It rests on them to make the link between what they think and what determines their particular way of thinking. We are tipping more in this direction, like Antoine Hennion, who analysed the manner in which amateurs defined their relation to taste, from “the analysis of critique to pragmatics” (Hennion) – one doesn’t do things, or think things “because of” social determinisms, one works “with.” Farmers, those whom we met because we knew that they had the capacity to do it, were not there to “say” or to witness a problem, they were with us to “do” and to construct the problem, and to do so actively and explicitly on the basis of what gives them a particular, localized, knowledge of the problem. “In our culture,” as Portuguese farmers Acácio and Antonio Moura say with respect to the question of work, “we link work with physical work. Women at home don’t work. Our mentality is set up as such, if we go to see someone and if we ask him if the cow is working or if it is not, he will reply, if she is in harness she is working, otherwise she isn’t working. This mode of thought which has been around for several years is also attached to the fact that a cow that works physically had a better market value.” In Claude Baijot’s case, his answers go back to the economic conditions of his system: “I think that as far as my stock goes, I was [previously] more sensitive to that side of things also, while now I am in the midst of it all, I have to manage to meet the needs of the family, and pay my investments as well. It’s maybe the economic aspect that … It’s definitely the economic aspect also, and I have to manage as best I can; last week we bought a house and we have to keep up. We are young, I am twenty-eight and this is maybe why … which sums up the way I think.” In two or three sentences the farmer has explicitly brought together several
96
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
despret & porcher explanatory registers which allow him to come to terms with the contrast between how he sees things today and how he saw them previously – “I was more sensitive”: to economic and psychic investments, causalities linked to status, or to the stages of life and family organization. The fact that a question addressed to a farmer “as a farmer” can boost confidence became even clearer to us when we realized, in the course of the research, that there was an interesting similarity between our proposition and the choice of system that most of them had adopted. Thus, the organic farmers often say to us that their specific practice is to lead animals to “do the work themselves,” graze rather than being fed; move to water sources; calve on their own; bring up their calves, even adopt another. The very act of reproduction is left up to them, most of such farmers giving up techniques of artificial insemination or even “hand breeding” [monte en mains]. Philippe Betton, not without humour, tells us that he resists the attempts of his boars to get him involved in copulation: “A farmer might have the reflex, especially with a sow in heat, when the boar tries to mount her, the farmer – sorry, I’d better not mix up the farmer and the boar – can have the immediate reflex to help the boar penetrate the sow, whereas in my case, I say, ‘No, that’s a mistake! That’s a mistake!’ If you have the reflex to help the boar penetrate the sow, the boar – he’s a bit lazy – he’s going to get lazy and later, he will get into the habit of waiting for the farmer so he can penetrate the sow.” We have taken the same path, in a way, by delegating our work in asking our interlocutors to take some of it on board, on trust. It is exactly by linking it to this term that the farmers describe the possibility of sharing work with their animals. And, no doubt also, the fact that the same Philippe Betton ends his anecdote about lazy boars by asserting that “the participation of the farmer has in some respect made the animal incompetent” should lead us to interrogate the way that research projects can sometimes leave few opportunities for competences.
97
A last consequence for our programme came up as we reread the transcripts of our interviews. Our interlocutors have often said things such as “I never thought about it, but now that I do … ,” “As I speak I realize … ,” or also, hesitating, changing their minds, telling us they are changing their minds, revealing contradictions themselves, announcing that they have suddenly found themselves “in a deadend, but I’ll get out of it,” saying, “it’s hard, I try to get it right. We do things so mechanically that we don’t even ask the question.” Or then Claude Baijot, who announces, at the end of the interview, that he had begun by describing himself as close to organic farmers, and who wonders, at the end of the discussion, if he isn’t an industrial farmer: “Now you have made me unsure.” What they have done with our proposal is grasp it as an occasion to put thought to work. Thinking with us or for us, to be perplexed, to slow down. They have helped us to turn this inquiry into a real experiment, an experience which, one way or another, transforms questions, modifies attitudes, displaces points of view and brings new ones into existence. So it is not so much of an accident if, in researching the differences between humans and animals, we have been greatly surprised to find ourselves exploring the inverse of our question, the one that concerns similarities and competences.
disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
notes Translated from Vinciane Despret and Jocelyne Porcher, Être bête © Editions Actes Sud, 2007, 87–107. 1 We have each taken on the responsibility for the questions that interest us respectively. Questions of work and the fact of power rest on earlier interviews and were therefore formulated by Jocelyne
the pragmatics of expertise Porcher; questions of difference and reference refer to the academic work of Vinciane Despret.
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
2 Our experience is not unique in this genre. Other researchers have, for their part, also tried redistributing expertise in other ways, without, however (as far as we know), using this particular protocol. Note, for example, that in the work of sociologists linked to agriculture and agronomy the processes by which knowledge is co-produced by sociologists and agronomists and by farmers have been widely studied. Darré, Le Sens des pratiques and La Production de connaissances pour l’action. 3 The notion of “recalcitrance” was Isabelle Stengers’, later put to use by Bruno Latour. It is explained at length in Stengers’ Invention of Modern Science and Cosmopolitics I and II. 4 The fact that Jocelyne Porcher worked as a farmer and therefore felt close to those she was investigating makes for a certain kind of practice. The choice to write on piggery work in collaboration with a former employee of the pig farming industry, Christine Tribondeau, translates and prolongs this political choice (Porcher and Tribondeau). For Vinciane Despret, it became necessary to modify her practice during research in refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia where the effects of the research ran the risk of stigmatization and therefore of worsening the condition of the people investigated. Addressing these people as refugees, for example, an identity they didn’t recognize themselves as having, only repeated the process of exclusion. On this topic, see Chauvenet, Despret, and Lemaire. 5 On this question of the methodological choices embarked upon in the refugee camps, see Despret, “L’Effet sans nom.” 6 In an earlier work we analysed the politeness of questioning by designating under this name the capacity for a question to make the one being addressed interesting. An impolite question makes people less interesting, less reflexive and, in a related manner, less interested. See Despret, Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. 7 Apart from the problem of expectations, other difficulties come crowding in the moment one takes into consideration the fact that the one being interrogated cannot help but be affected by the manner of interrogation. See Porcher, “L’Occultation de l’affectivité.”
8 Most experiments in psychology are constructed on the ignorance of subjects as to what is really driving the research. Stanley Milgram, for example, in his famous experiment, makes out he is conducting research on the effects of electric shocks in training. In fact, the true object of the experiment is the capacity of the subjects to be obedient – without realizing to what point the apparatus is only measuring the subjects’ submission to the researchers. The so-called ignorance of the subjects is incidentally often cast as “silent consent,” but they have, for the most part, understood what is going on, and have at the same time perfectly adapted to the idea that what is expected of them is simulated naivety. 9 In this, our work links in at least two aspects, to Jean-Marie Lemaire’s proposed clinical work in consultation clinics. One is the active search for expertise as resource, especially by insisting on the fact that the social workers, in situations of multiple difficulties, are brought in by the users. Secondly, it is all about looking, to the best of one’s ability, for the sites where conflicts, dissent, and disagreements are practicable. See Lemaire, “Liens soignées, liens soignants.” 10 Here we are inheriting a whole tradition in pragmatic sociology, going from John Dewey to Bruno Latour and passing through Luc Boltanski and plenty of others. However, this position is often only made possible after critical work has been done. So, what can one do when strategies to mitigate suffering are at the same time those that paralyse thought? 11 The fact that interpretation always comes afterwards must on no account make one think that the stance of the inquiry is not affected. The very fact of replying to questions concerning biography, infant traumas, “life stories,” as is the case with numerous projects, and the fact that those interrogated, in general, don’t allow themselves to make remarks such as “But what’s that got to do with my project?,” shows that from the very start they submit themselves to the researcher’s interpretation.
bibliography Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.
98
despret & porcher Chauvenet, Antoinette, Vinciane Despret, and Jean-Marie Lemaire. Clinique de la reconstruction. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Print. Darré, Jean-Pierre. La Production de connaissances pour l’action. Arguments contre le racisme de l’intelligence. Paris: INRA/Fondation Maisons des sciences de l’homme, 1999. Print.
Zask, Joëlle. “La Politique comme expérimentation.” By John Dewey. Le Public et ses problèmes. Trans. Joëlle Zask. Pau and Paris: PUP/ Farrago/Léo Scheer, 2003. Print.
Darré, Jean-Pierre. Le Sens des pratiques. Conceptions d’agriculteurs et modèles d’agronomes. Paris: INRA, 2004. Print.
Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 17:02 19 May 2015
Despret, Vinciane. “L’Effet sans nom. L’Anonymat dans les pratiques de la psychologie.” Web. . Despret, Vinciane. Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002. Print. Dewey, John. The Public and its Problems. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print. Hennion, Antoine. “Affaires de goût. Se rendre sensible aux choses.” Sensibiliser. La Sociologie dans le vif du monde. Ed. Michel Peroni and Jacques Roux. La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 2006. 161–74. Print. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Lemaire, Jean-Marie. “Liens soignées, liens soignants, cliniques de concertation et violences de quartier.” Cahiers de psychologie clinique 28.1 (2007): 99–120. Print. Porcher, Jocelyne. “L’Occultation de l’affectivité dans l’expérimentation animale. Le Paradoxe des protocoles.” Nature, Sciences, Société I (2002): 33– 36. Print. Porcher, Jocelyne, and Christine Tribondeau. Une vie de cochon. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Print. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics II. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. Stengers, Isabelle. The Invention of Modern Science. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print.
Vinciane Despret Philosophie et Lettres Université de Liège 4000 Liège Belgium E-mail:
[email protected] Jocelyne Porcher 143 rue Marc Rigal, C322 34070 Montpellier France E-mail:
[email protected] Stephen Muecke School of Humanities and Languages University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia E-mail:
[email protected]
