In that French theorist/Jonathan Safran Foer style, he has a way of using English against itself, bending it far past the any sane native speaker’s breaking point. I’m working through his book, Science in Action, first published in 1987. One of his most charming traits, and a major part of his methodology, is to make few distinctions between nodes in his networks of innovation. Humans and non-humans are given very similar treatment.

“[W]e call ’scientists’ and ‘engineers’ those subtle enough to include in the same repertoire of ploys human and non-human resources, thus increasing their margin for negotiation,” he writes. He then goes on to describe the production of the electronic repeater in the Bell Company’s laboratory: “Domesticated electrons have been made to play a role in a convoluted alliance that allows the Bell Company to triumph over its rivals.”

Apropos energy technology, he has a fantastic description of the windmill’s social power that I quote in toto. It’s Latour’s key example of a machine.

A machine, as its name implies, is first of all, a machination, a stratagem, a kind of cunning, where borrowed forces keep one another in check so that none can fly apart from the group. This makes the machine different from a tool which is a single element held directly in the hand of a man or a woman. Useful as tools are, they never turn Mr or Ms Anybody into Mr or Ms Manybodies! The trick is to sever the link each tool has wth each body and tie them to one another instead. The pestle is a tool in the woman’s hand; she is stronger with it than with her hands alone, for now she is able to grind corn. However if you tie the grinder to a wooden frame and if this frame is tied to the sails of a mail that profits from the wind, this is a machine, a windmill, that puts into the miler’s hands an assembly of forces no human could ever match.

It is essential to note that the skills required to go from the pestle to the windmill are exactly symmetrical to the ones we saw in Part A. How can the wind be borrowed? How can it be made to have a bearing on corn and bread? How can its force be translated so that, whatever it does or does not do, the corn is reliably ground? Yes, may use the words translation and interest as well, because it is no more and no less difficult to interest a group in the fabrication of vaccine than to interest the wind in the fabrication of bread. Complicated negotiations have to go on continuously in both cases so that the provisional alliances do not break off.