Science is a machine that travels in circles. In their most known work, Berger and Luckmann (1966) posited that a reproduction of knowledge occurs in the habitualized patterns of behaviors and actions that support a collective understanding of the world. Once it is internalized, the original source of such knowledge is forgotten, and all that we know is what we know: the fact. It is with science, where we can come to understand how we come to know things by remembering what we have forgotten. To do this, we have to study the errors of it (Bloor 1991). For sociology this is problematic, because a teleological strategy, combined with contemporary sociology’s ontological amplification of positivism, says Chernilo (2014), leads to a “self-fulfilling dystopia” (351) of getting a problem out of something because all one does is define their situations with problems, and as a consequence, good finds become answers and not solutions (it is bound by the problem that leads to another). In this way, a sociology of knowledge as run by scientists means that their science, no matter how objectively used, are tools designed alongside the problems socially defined to solve. As Bloor (1991) says, it “does not matter” (18) if science is ‘correct’, but the way they are corrective in its epistemological tools and theories is key. It is not what we know that is fact; it is how and how much we are told. As such, science is a pedal of knowledge, described by both Bloor (1991:5) as an “engine on rails” and Latour (1983:155) as “trains, [that] they do not work off their rails” of information which already exists, being later turned into knowledge that is a ‘discovery’ once externalized, and common sense once internalized (Berger and Luckmann 1966). This train of science stops for nobody because it is not travelling anywhere. It is simply there to remind us when we seek to travel for our truths, which way is the most paved and laid out. By circling around networks, a new construction from deconstructed social facts is brought back to the lab station, forming circles of context and norms used to understand and belong.
It does not matter which cabin one sits during a train ride because the locomotion takes and shakes everyone the same. In this sense, to chase for a seat at the head or tail of the train of science is to fight about who gets off first – it does not matter – everyone gets off eventually, but everyone is subject to the same ride. Arguing about who knows what is a “dispute… [that] misses the fundamental point” argues Latour (1983:144), since the scientists of Pasteur’s lab are not experts in farming as the farmers, or veterinary science as the vets, and vice versa. Since “interests… can be constructed” (145) without a laboratory, the point that knowledge, from common sense to gossip, influences and comes from the social construction of everyday life is “beyond dispute” (Bloor 1991:3). It is instead, to seek how we come to be interested in this particular thing in the first place, making us question and demand answers from science. While readers of Callon’s (1986) piece on scallops might seek to interessement, arguably the point at which the social construction has reached fruition and now observable by the roles that enforce and reproduce them, the ‘dispute’ which Bloor and Latour mentions is the key behind building the science train. This is found at the very beginning of it all – the problematization of indispensable science.
Imagine travelling in the badlands or the canyons, now or during the Wild West. Traversing by foot through sand and storm is like figuring out what the answer is without knowing what the question is or was anymore. By surveying everyone and everything you know, it is tedious, and you would die of dehydration from millions of non-stop interviews. Instead, the train offers the same passage, but in a shorter amount of time and importantly, through scenes you never saw – or saw in this way. In the comfort of an automated guided path, you are able to traverse with your eyes instead of your legs, the beauty that would have been the burden of a hike. This is what makes the invisible, visible (Latour 1983): a granted context, ontological recognition, and our belonging within it. Problematization is key, argues Callon (1986), because in order for us to ‘go back’ to living just like the scallops, or for the marine biologists and COVID-scientists to succeed, or fishermen and vaccine pocketers to thrive, everyone needs to realize that figuring “this question can benefit each of them” (8), and that question is: “how do[es] [the bloody subject] anchor” in relation to us? Just as Latour’s (1983) bacteria that became the anthrax disease, or the organism that became SARS-Cov-2, and the scallops that became the point of everyone’s future livelihoods, no single actant can “attain what they want by themselves” (Callon 1983:8). And as such, the path to one’s truth is no longer enough – an answer is needed to this universal problem. Only once a mediator emerges to clear this “road [that] is blocked by a series of obstacles” (8) that is the standpoint of our truths and biases, can we begin to live (together). Cue in: the whistle, the rumble, and the speed of the indispensable science train.
The train of science does two things for the vagabond wanderer of truth: “something happens to [us]… [of which] that never happened before” (Latour 1983:146). Flying inside a ten-ton-locomotive on a wooden bridge from one canyon rock to another instead of taking the shadowed path at the feet of the canyon grants one the ontology specifically to them, and something never possible before: the ontologies of everyone else. When has science ever mentioned the interests of one person? It is always ‘for the human race’, ‘for this population’, or funnily, ‘for science’ – whatever that means! It is the once invisible eyes of a bald eagle who sees the sparseness of information but through the individual person, what they choose to see at this vantage point is what makes the hike enjoyable: from a ‘waste of space’ to ‘wonder of the world’.
This was the ‘magic’ of the laboratory in taking the natural bacteria of the farmlands, and cultivating it the empire it never had in order to kill it again. By raising a world, the lab strips all of it and uses it tape up the one we live in. It is to anchor the scallops, the bacteria, and now the virus, in order to pin it down, strip it, and to reconstruct again, the thing into something we can know and understand. Simply, it is to make a non-human a non-HUMAN thing, “personified as an autonomous agent… when, in fact, it is a part of us” (Vallee 2022:10). What better way to instill knowledge than saying this is something people forgot to remember?
This ability to seemingly pave a floating road from one giant rock to another was science’s ability to “translate other’s interests into [their] own language” (Latour 1983:144) by circling around the already known truths that cows died from a pathogen – but to scale, invert, and inscribe these constructions into contexts that it is a ‘disease’ and by making it visible; it is to point out a spider in a big room – it is there, and it is not going anywhere. This displacement essentially deconstructs previous constructed facts that nothing was more to the death of cows, and in problematizing and enrolling, to use Callon’s (1986) language, the farmers, vets, and essentially the French public due to their consumption of cow produce, are jammed as interlocking units (Cerulo 2009) of a problem they are made to never forget. In this way, science became indispensable, since to travel by the locomotive of trusting scientific facts, or taking that long hike to ‘truth’ yourself, “you have to pass through my [train tracks]” (Latour 1983:145). Why is it, that when we visit a new city and with this, the chance to plot new knowledge by experience, we must refer to or be referred in our paths, the ‘streets’, ‘landmarks’, and ‘routes’ built by science and engineers? They are not First Peoples, birds, or guides! It comes back to the point that science is a deconstruction of knowledge, and in its recontextualization, to trust science is to ride a path most used that ‘points to the truth’ (albeit someone’s or not, it is nonetheless ‘the truth’).
Take for example, the opposing sides of the pro- and anti-vaccine crowds. Both sides fight on the being that was shown the “variation of virulence” (Latour 1983:148), scaled and inscribed, and translated “[a]s a process” (Callon 1986:1) which never ends – there is always more to ‘find out’ about the ‘truth’ of COVID-19 because it is constructed as both a virus and a vaccine. Both are riding the same train of science, albeit different cabins or isles, but nonetheless the pursuit of truth demands citing ‘studies that show…’, and often, interestingly, with pictures and stories of humans and spokespersons (Callon 1986) of the virus – nurses ‘warning’ about the vaccine, ex-Trump supporters in ICUs, Anthony Fauci, university doctors etc. This is the where the invisible becomes visible: where the non-human becomes non-HUMAN, and the thing-power (Bennett 2010, as cited in Vallee 2022) energizes the collective body of society and individual human bodies into a natureculture problem that was always the nature of organism cultures: micro-(now macro, thanks to Latour’s scaling)-organisms lives inside and with a larger organism, the macro gets ill when the mirco binds with specific receptors, and one of the them lives better when the other starts to die.
As such, the question with science as a motivator machine is not who runs it, as we know it circles around places paved by others to remember this route and forget the rest, but instead: where does this lead us? If, per Bloor (1991), everything is fit for material of study and as such problematic if you are told it is one, then we are no different than the conspiracy theorists who have paved their own path to “voluntarily limit the scope” (1) of a truth, albeit with less recognized materials and wobbly bridges. Does this recirculation of knowledge make us crazy? Are these motivating machines and those who sit in front – scientists who stage (Latour 1983) their newfound discovery through trial and error, peer review, and finally publication as ‘new knowledge’ all ‘loco’ by nature? Why are we travelling to see something when everything is already available if you ask the birds and the locals, the travel brochure, or the internet?
Perhaps this is where human beings comes in – we are not just ultra-social animals (Tomasello 2014), but it is knowledge which makes us social. Why do we find the need to speak of the same story over and over, from cave paintings, to diaries, to plays, novels, film, and videogames narratives? Following Bloor (1991) on social construction, it may come down to our need to define our situations in order for the consequences to be truthful (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Science is ostensibly for all, but it is netted, read, and foremost evaluated on the relationship it has to humankind. Microscopes, telescopes, X-Ray machines, scanners, and pipettes are all controlled by the eyes, arms, and legs of the human scientist. These machines are nothing but limb extensions of our ultra-social, knowledge seeking and making, bodies. With so much information and the problems, answers, and truth pursuits that emerge at every second, our only choice in this environment of imbroglios (Latour 1993) is to ride that locomotive, even if it is possible that we are going for a loop of ‘loco’ motions (e.g., confirmation bias, self-fulfilling, echo chambers).
Either way, thanks to the science train, we are able to belong and become better with the knowledge of some things from everything. Like COVID-19, the science of the vaccine and the virus reminds us of what our bodies are and are not (Vallee 2022). There are others too, who are walking the storm and sand path to their truths, albeit following the rails of the train but not boarding it, and circling back to their preferred station and networks. The problem is therefore the unifying need for train riders and truth trekkers to travel, but the answer that comes from it – the ‘tourism’ of the travel – is found by the roads and canyon bridges that diverge between machine and men, only to convene eventually again. Like the lab, where the inside/outside is switched (Latour 1983), for knowledge to be ‘truthful’, it must work “in the real world out there” (155) – for truth trekkers and train riders, their ‘real world’ rests in their position of sand or cabin, so the train of science is only there is remind both parties that because opposing and other truths continue to exist, we must remember why we know what we like to know (Spinoza, as cited in Appelrouth and Edles 2007), and that means travelling, guiding, the path of the locomotive no matter where or what it leads to.
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