Mathieu Quet, Politiques du savoir: Sciences, technologies et participation dans les années 1968, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17155
application/pdf
2038-3460
17155
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Francesca Musiani
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Mathieu Quet, Knowledge Politics: Science, Technology and Participation in the 1968s, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2013
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
4
Book Reviews
2014-01-04
2023-06-12
2014-01-04
2023-11-07
156-159
TS
Francesca Musiani
2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17155
156
MINES ParisTech
2038-3460
2
en
159
Mathieu Quet, Knowledge Politics: Science, Technology and Participation in the 1968s, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2013
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17155/16062
4
156                                                         Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

finds legitimation in the “word of science”, in the name of the mainte-
nance of social order, especially in emergencies, risks, dangers and crises.
But when the events contradict this word, memories, fears, old angers re-
surface and the conflict of subjected knowledges emerges as an open
crack in the damaged walls of the rationalized structures of modernity.
Through the cracks, the day after the earthquake, between the dust and
the rubble, something that was already happening in the days and weeks
before the 6th April became clearer: in that period L’Aquila was in fact
turned into a sort of laboratory of public fear and reassurance, that was
produced by the degeneration of the social function of scientific institu-
tions. The ‘bio-political’ experiment was to intervene through a “media
operation” (as the ex-head of Italian Civil Protection, Guido Bertolaso
put it) on a population weakened by weeks of earthquake, with the goal
not to discuss, make evaluation, research information: the aim was to re-
assure people, persuading them that there would not be an earthquake.
This is the accusation of Ciccozzi against that “word of science” which
provokes death and pain with the negligence and incompetence of power.

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                                   * * *!


Mathieu Quet
Politiques du savoir: Sciences, technologies et participation dans les an-
nées 1968 [Knowledge Politics: Science, Technology and Participation in
the 1968s]
Paris, Editions des archives contemporaines, 2013, pp. xii+226

Francesca Musiani MINES ParisTech
    When participatory mechanisms fail, it is because their promoters
have taken for granted the founding elements of the very definition of
participation – a reductionist view that ends up breaking against the wall
of “reality” and complexity of today’s political processes. Using as an in-
troductory example the spectacular failure of the 2009-2010 public cycles
of discussions on nanotechnology organized by the French Commission
for Public Debate (CNDP), this is how Mathieu Quet (researcher at the
Parisian Institut de la Recherche et du Développement – IRD), introduces
us to the central argument of his book, based on a PhD dissertation de-
fended at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2009. The
definition that the promoters of participatory mechanisms make of partic-
ipation – often too narrow and reductive, if not outright incomplete or
based on powerful assumptions – should be put on trial so as to highlight
the plurality of organizational, social and political forms that constitute
Book Review                                                               157
“participation” in practice.
    To do so, explains the author, it is necessary to retrace the history that
has shaped participation as a term. Yet, the book does not have the ambi-
tion – which would most likely be excessive – to start this history from
the beginnings of political participation, to be traced back to the origins
of democracy in ancient Greece. Instead, it focuses on a moment in time
and in space when “a notion of participation in science and technology
emerges, still fragile, less categorically and hegemonically defined” (p. 4):
the 1970s in France. What interests the author most are the discourses of
participation rather than its practices: but his approach situates itself in
the scholarly current that, blending communication studies with STS,
looks at the discursive dimension of problems as issue- and sense-making,
having an active role in the shaping of devices, processes and practices.
The “suspended genealogy” of the 1970s, as he calls it (p. 5), allows the
author to follow the emergence of what it means to participate in science
and technology as a central issue of our times. His narration is both
chronological and analytical.
    Chapter 1, an avant-histoire covering the 1945-1968 period, analyzes
how the emergence of the participation discourse is dependent on a varie-
ty of converging social evolutions. The chapter argues that this emergence
is the consequence of the 1968 political and cultural movements impact-
ing the French scientific and technical world as it had shaped itself
throughout the trente glorieuses, the decades of economic prosperity that
followed the end of the Second World War. The “infrastructural” con-
text of participation is laid down. A “Big Science” is born, the accom-
plished integration of science, industry and state, the material changes in
living and working conditions reflected in institutional evolutions and
changes in the control structures.
    Chapter 2 introduces the “explosive encounter” (p. 30) between the
new cultural and activist forms, appeared in May 1968, and the powerful
Big Science machine. The ’68 dynamics of controversy and militancy take
hold of issues related to science and technology. In doing so, they plant
the seeds of a renovated, less naïve, more complex discourse on the polit-
ical dimension of science. Declarations of intent to “put the science at the
service of people” are no longer enough to face the important questions
of societies’ relationship to scientific and technical development. As sci-
ence and technology emerge as bearers of new political issues, new claims
of participation in scientific and technological choices start rising.
    The birth of the “scientific autocritique”, known in other countries as
radical science movement, which will eventually lead to laying down some
of the premises of participation, is the subject of Chapter 3. While French
activist engagement in science and technology first takes the shape of an-
ti-nuclear critiques and environmental controversies, the “politicization”
of science and technology also takes place within the scientific field itself.
Researchers renew their political engagement by claiming novel forms of
responsibility vis-à-vis their professional activities, which leads, more
158                                                         Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

broadly, to rethink practices of scientific engagement. The Big Science is
not enough and not all: reflections start on the collective practices of sci-
ence, and on the necessity of a People’s Science (as in produced by the
people). These reflections lay the ground for some of the premises of par-
ticipation.
    This self-critical movement is soon echoed by governmental institu-
tions (Chapter 4). The entities in charge of scientific policy and foresight
are especially receptive to the claims of young critical researchers. A
“governmental variation” (p. 79) on the notion of participation takes
shape, this time associated with institutions – in particular with the Or-
ganization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD – rather
than with emancipation from politics. By setting the scene for a decade of
reflections on technological evaluation, the OECD comes to define par-
ticipation as the means to regulate the political space by avoiding conflict
as much as possible, and the tool for a more effective and rational gov-
ernment. “Participation participates” (p. 102) in the governmental pro-
ject, by representing and making explicit to governments the interests of
social actors.
    In Chapter 5, human and social sciences enter the picture – the author
presents Science and Technology Studies (or Science, Technology and
Society, STS), as a field of study, as an actor in the shaping of participa-
tion. Focusing again on the emergence of the field in France, which hap-
pens in the mid-70s, the author observes that it entails the “institutionali-
zation of the critique of sciences in university settings” (p. 103). The
themes of participation are imported in the academic field, but during
this operation, they are reformulated, and give birth to other participatory
premises. Notably, participation becomes less of a normative and political
matter, and more of an epistemological and descriptive one.
    Chapter 6 addresses the different social “circulations” among the
three different spaces analyzed in the previous chapters: participation as a
governmental tool, promoted by institutions; participation as a means of
description of the social, prompted in university settings; participation as
need for emancipation and empowerment, fostered by the militant milieu.
The author argues that these three spaces, as different as they could be,
become intertwined again. An integrated analysis of participation cannot
neglect the circulation of objects, references, people that “contribute to
the reproduction of homogeneity where we see nothing but heterogeneity
yet” (p. 129). The last part of the book takes on the discussion of the
threads and concepts that are given birth in this common regime of dis-
course, beyond frontiers and differences specific to each space.
    Chapter 7 addresses in more details, and in a comparative perspective,
the specificities of the conceptions to be found in each space, before
showing what these conceptions share, and what they can contribute to
the contemporary definition of participation. The militant space pushes
for a reconsideration of the public, coupled with a de-consideration of
the expert; the technocratic/institutional space conceives participation as
Book Review                                                               159
a tool of pacification of the social order; academic settings produce a de-
scriptive and epistemological conception of participation, feeding the par-
ticipatory imaginaire with the construction of representations of scientific
practice. Yet, these three spaces “participate in a same discursive regime”
(p. 164): all these significations co-exist, and according to different peri-
ods of time, spaces, and configurations, some of them become dominant
and more effective than others, determining, in turn, different representa-
tions of what le politique is.
     The last chapter of the book ties its different threads together, arguing
for the necessity of a perspective of “pluralization” of the sense that is to-
day most frequently attributed to participation, that of deliberation and
precaution in face of a potentially “risky” science. In particular, the au-
thor suggests that the participatory discourse of the 1970s can be inter-
preted as “experimentation” (p. 175). While some elements of each of the
three definitions seem to have disappeared from the dominant definitions
of today, there is a convergence between the remaining elements. In par-
ticular, all three seem to have in-built the “metaphor of experience” (p.
185): a recurring equivalence between participation and experimentation.
It is important, the author concludes, to read the participatory discourses
of the 1970s less as the predecessors of contemporary participation, and
more as the elements of a “suspended genealogy”, by means of which par-
ticipation is founded as a practice of experimentation with formats and
contents, not as a practice of deliberation and control.
     What does the analysis of participation in the France of the 1970s tell
us of the problems, and the potential, of participation mechanisms today?
There is little doubt that participation has become a major issue of to-
day’s democracies and a passe-partout word of global governance. Yet,
following Sheila Jasanoff, the author argues that participation as it is de-
fined today does not allow to solve the problem of the democratization of
science and technology. The historiography of participation that unfolds
in this book, by putting in perspective the construction of the meaning of
the need for participation, does not have a normative objective, does not
wish to prescribe how participation should be. Instead, it can give a
toolbox for a better understanding of participation’s pluralist nature. The
reader – especially the foreign reader – can sometimes have the feeling
that she is getting lost in the sea of references and the extremely detailed
accounts of French research and science policy that populate the book;
however, the epistemological and historical objective of Mathieu Quet’s
intellectual project is successfully achieved through this agile, well-
documented, engagingly-written volume.
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