Prologue

'It`s sunny, this morning on the Neuchtel lake,

and windy and cold. What`s that bright little
shape out there? Ah, a sailboard out there in the
wind. It`s moving fast. How fast? I could use the
lampposts along the quay to tick the time it takes
him to pass behind each of them. With a good
Swiss chronometer, a knowledge of how far the
sailboard is from the land, an evaluation of the
angle of its course not an easy task given the
erratic moves of the board I could end up with
a speed, that is a ratio of distance over time. Of
course I really couldn`t because I`m pretty bad at
calculating, even worse than at sailboarding. I
can only play the observer on the edge. Oops,
here he is in the water! There he is again, back
on the board, on a different tack, even faster
along the waves now crested with the white
foam triggered by the fiercer swerving wind.
Now that he is closer to me, I see a broad smile
on his face. The surfboarder seems to enjoy him-
self immensely. He does not see time passing by.
Strange to try to measure time while strolling
along the lake, during the break of a meeting on
Piaget. Even stranger to play the outside ob-
server. Of course, I could calculate the surfboard
trajectory, and obtain a ratio, a form, a speed,
something that would neither be in time, nor in
space. A timeless number. I too could reach,
from the safe and solid ground of that most
sturdy and stolid Swiss city, the sure grasp of a
formalism. But then, would something be miss-
ing? What, what exactly would be missing? No
hurry here. Take your time. The meeting is full
of psychologists, of phenomenologists. They
Trains of Thought
The Eifth Dimension of Time and its Eabrication
1
Bruno Latour
talk about 'lived time. Careful. They have an
axe to grind. They want to criticize scientific
time, the atemporal and atopical coordinates of
what they call science. (Here he has fallen again,
brought down by a sudden gust! Here he is
again, darting away now.) Is the surfboarder
moving like an arrow in 'lived time and space?
Unlikely. 'Lived, one of these empty words that
have no opposite, and are given a semblance of
profundity because they appear to attack the
cold and timeless and spaceless apparatus of
dead reason. If I had managed to calculate the
speed of that darting sailboarder, in what way
would I have abandoned the 'lived world of
this sunny day in Neuchtel? I would have
needed a watch, and a benchmark, and posts,
and rulers, and a staff of helpers, and theodo-
lites, the whole equipment and crew that Ed
Hutchins describes so well when he shows the
number of operations necessary to steer a
dreadnought into San Diego harbor (Hutchins
1995). In what sense are these operations not
'lived? And yet, in the end I would have ob-
tained a speed, that is a timeless spaceless fig-
ure, a form, a ratio, on a piece of paper, held in
my hand, inside my world, along the beach, un-
der the sun, on the campus. So then, at no point
would I have left the world. I would have added
to the Neuchtel lake another piece, another fea-
ture, an observer setting up apparatuses to calcu-
late surfboard speeds. But then the surfboarder
(now barely a spot on the horizon) is not adding
'fun to the calculated speed. He is not adding
the 'lived feeling of a sunny morning, to the
accurate definition of a timeless and spaceless
instant and place. Why are all these psycholo-
1
Since this lecture was written to be read out loud as a eulogy in honor of Jean Piaget`s anniversary, I kept
most of the oral tone and abstained from adding footnotes. Many thanks to Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
whose meetings in Neuchtel are always a source of deep enjoyment. This paper owes a lot to the fascinat-
ing exploration in the structure of physical time by Niels Viggo Hansen from Aarhus University. I thank him
for his extremely helpful comments. I also acknowledge my debt to the decade-long meditation by Geff
Bowker on the production of time and to the notion of trails developed by the philosopher Adrian Cussins
(Cussins 1992).
174 Bruno Latour
gists comparing the 'lived time to the 'real
time, the 'subjective time to the 'objective
time? My calculation of speed, I mean my appa-
ratus, my institution to extract speed from the
surfboarder, is inside the world where he sails
fast, and is not the depth feature on which his
own psychological world would be built. How
could I be so arrogant as to imagine that my cal-
culation defines the primary quality of every-
thing else? How could I be so forgetful of
watches, and staff, and poles, and rulers, and
crews, and compasses, and serious Swiss help-
ers? Especially here, just a few hours after hav-
ing visited the Museum of Time in La Chaux-
de-Eonds? No, the watch is not the depth feature
of the horizon, but is added to the world, and so
is this tenacious and ingenuous industry cuddled
in its mounain valleys, bringing so much wealth
to this doll-house university. But then, if I am
right, in what sort of world is the surfboarder
moving? (Now, his dark speck and triangular
wing are growing fast again straight towards
me.) No, no, he is not in a human, subjective,
psychological, mental time-space. I want no part
in this painting job, where the 'lived world
adds false but warm colors to a real but bleak
reality made of measurements. (He is still grin-
ning, going fast towards the beach as if he
wanted to skateboard onto the campus green
straight from the lake, enjoying himself im-
mensely. At the last second, he briskly veers
away and he is gone again). Enjoyment. That is
the space-time in which he resides and moves.
He is no more moving in space than he is in
time. He is not adding a subjective morning to
real mornings. Subjective lakes to real lakes. He
explores the multiplicity of ways of being, he
goes from some to many, from boring to alert
ones, from a little wind to a fierce gale, from a
low intensity to a higher intensity. Yes, that`s it,
he is moving into enjoyment, intensity, ways of
being, alterations, and if I want to calculate his
speed, I can, but I won`t define the depth of his
world, the backdrop of all existence, I will sim-
ply add a color to the many colors there are al-
ready, maybe a grey, a dark color, but still a
color. And thus, and thus, my dear psychologist
colleagues, there is no need to turn towards the
mind, or to subjectivity to escape from the cold
and objective time to find the rich 'lived world
of meaning. To find richness, one only has to
turn towards the world itself, to the wind, the
foam, the sun, the snow-capped mountains in the
back, the earnest miniature city behind the har-
bor. 'Objective time and 'subjective time are
like taxes exacted on what peoples the world,
they are not all that these multitudes do and see
and mean and want. We are not forced to choose
forever between losing the feeling of time or the
structural features of the world. Processes are no
more in time than in space. Process is a third
term, as if the surfboarding were moving into
ways of being, exploring its alterity, its alter-
ations. A third term! My poor fellow, are you
growing tired of always trying out third terms,
only to hear your audience object: 'Yes, but time
is not a mere social construction? Who said so?
Not me anyway, but nobody listens. Their love-
hate affair with science has blinded them to any
other possibility. If it is not objective, then it is
subjective. If it is not subjective, then it is objec-
tive. Chances are that if they understood that I am
not a social constructivist, they would recoil in
horror: 'But this is abject metaphysics!. Well,
too bad, I`m afraid it is. (The surfboarder is back
now, folding his equipment, packing it up, seems
happy). Time to resume the session and hear more
about the many differences between the 'lived
notion of time and 'real time ...
The paradox of the twin travelers
To meet together in order to celebrate Jean
Piaget`s centenary, we need some measure of
time for instance, his birth certificate as re-
corded by the well-organized Neuchtel bureau-
cracy, the computing of days and months calcu-
lated by the Annals of astronomers and various
Bureaus of Longitudes, and we also have to rely
on a venerable Western tradition that stresses
anniversaries and prefers nice round numbers
like 100 or 1,000 to more exotic ones like 88 or
133 or 666, and that puts special emphasis on
someone`s birthplace instead of, for instance, the
city where his books were first published or
from which his first grant was awarded... Simply
to gather at the right time, 1996, and at the right
place, Neuchtel, it is already clear that we need
maps, institutions, recording devices, and tradi-
tions of ritual.
If I remind the audience of these trifling de-
tails, it is not to be impolite and criticize the title
of this symposium Mind and Time just when
it begins, but to stress in this paper that 'time is
not something that is in the 'mind or that is
Trains of Thought 175
'thought by a mind, but something rooted in a
long material and technical practice of record
keeping, itself merged into institutions and local
histories. In philosophical discussions about
time, the work of inscription and the fabrication
of times in the plural is all too often forgot-
ten. To recover time we need to delve into the
machinery of measuring it, for which Neuchtel
and its region are known the world over. The
amusing paradox of our international conference
is to have chosen, in honor of the local hero, a
theme the measurement, recording, and fabri-
cation of times which is well known to the
Swiss economy but which Piaget did his utmost
to ignore, even to repress, during all his schol-
arly life. 'How the fabrication of time never en-
tered Piaget`s mind could be the title of my
somewhat embarassed eulogy... I will not talk as
a specialist on Piaget which, of course, I am not,
but as a philosopher of science interested in un-
derstanding why close attention to the practice
of fabricating time and space in science and
technology has not done more to renew the phi-
losophy of time. Piaget, in this respect, stands as
having launched the most forceful intellectual
enterprise of the century to ignore the fabrica-
tion of time and its consequences on philosophy.
In the first part of my paper, I simply want to
set up what I will call the paradox of the twin
travelers and draw a few lessons from these little
thought experiments to open a third avenue be-
tween subjective and objective time. In the sec-
ond part, I want to use some results from science
and technology studies to see the impact they
could have on the machinery of space and time
formation. Einally, at the end, I want to interro-
gate the link between formalism and timeless-
ness and imagine some of the reasons that could
have led Piaget to insist so much on forms.
Imagine two twins. The first voyager sets off
in a deep jungle and cuts her way with a hatchet
along a trail which is barely visible. Each
minute, she opens a few centimeters of a path-
way, but she ages more than one minute. She
sweats. Her body bears the traces of her efforts;
each meter can be read in the bloody scars made
by thorns and ferns. The path gets cut as she
goes along, but she is lacerated as well. A suffer-
ing body strives among other suffering bodies,
vines, grass, and woods. She will no doubt re-
member all her life every minute of this excruci-
ating trip across the jungle. The reason she will
remember it is that each centimeter has been
won over through a complicated 'negotiation
with other entities branches, snakes, sticks
that were going in other directions and had other
ends and goals.
See by comparison how comfortable is the
other traveler, her twin brother, who came to this
conference, for instance, like me, by TGV! He
sat quietly in his first-class air-conditioned car-
riage and read his newspaper, paying no atten-
tion to the number of places crossed by the
speedy train which all looked to him like land-
scapes projected on a movie screen. He did not
age more than the three hours of the trip. His
body does not bear any trace of the voyage, ex-
cept for a few wrinkles on his trousers and
maybe a few cramps because he did not stretch
his long legs often enough. He will not remem-
ber anything except having boarded the train in-
stead of coming by plane. Only the articles he
read in the newspaper might be briefly recalled.
The trip for him was like nothing. All the atoms
of steel, all the electrons, all the gates, all the
switches, all of the efforts of the train compa-
nies, SNCE and CEE, were aligned in the same
direction, going fast through space in time obey-
ing to the millisecond the world-famous Swiss
exactitude and the almost as famous Erench
TGV quality of service. No negotiation along
the way, no event, hence no memory of anything
to mention. 'An uneventful trip, as he says to
his friend when alighting from the train.
Why am I comparing these two twins and the
way they age? Because I want to direct our at-
tention to a phenomenon that is logically prior
to the fabrication of times, and that consists in a
relation between transportation and transforma-
tion.
Eor each move of the woman traveler she is
modified and ages more than a bit, maybe to the
point of losing her life. The male traveler is not
modified a bit by the trip and only an anony-
mous bomb or, as we shall see, a strike might
interrupt his smooth and speedy run. Thus, the
first traveler will equate transportation (or dis-
placement) with modification, aging, history,
transformation, metamorphosis. The second will
differentiate two apparently different phenom-
ena: moving through space in time, on the one
hand, and aging, living, suffering, participating
in events on the other. Since the relation between
transportation and transformation differs in both
cases, the production of times and spaces, I want
to argue, will be entirelv different. The first voy-
176 Bruno Latour
ager will not differentiate space, time, and ag-
ing; we will call her indifferentiation processual.
Her twin brother will see no difficulty in distin-
guishing what is displaced from the immutable
framework in which it is displaced.
The separation between time and space on the
one hand and entities, beings, or events on the
other, is not a fundamental distinction, but one
made by some travelers in some very specific
and historically situated means of transportation
(it is for instance hard to get this distinction in
Chinese thought according to Jullien (1992).
Hence, in discussing time we may not have to
pay an exclusive attention to the two main posi-
tions which have occupied modern philosophers.
Time and space are not the Newtonian sensoria
in which events occur and planets fall along el-
lipses. But they are not, either, the forms of our
perception, the universal a prioris that our mind
has to use in order to frame or accommodate the
multiplicity of beings and entities. Ear from be-
ing primitive terms, they are, on the contrary,
consequences of the ways in which bodies relate
to one another. We will thus link our meditation
to the third tradition, the Leibnizian one, that
considers space and time as expressing some re-
lation between the entities themselves. But in-
stead of one Space-Time we will generate as
many spaces and times as there are types of rela-
tions. Thus, progressing along trails will not pro-
duce the same space-times as going smoothly
along networks. It makes an enormous differ-
ence if those bodies are suffering bodies among
other suffering bodies, or a relaxed air-condi-
tioned executive in a bullet train.
What is this difference? Can we make it more
precise? Yes, because I was wrong in the brief
sketch I gave of the man`s trip. In spite of his
smooth voyage, something marked and shocked
him, making the trip memorable for him. The
train passed at 150 kilometers an hour without
stopping in the very place, Culoz, where all the
trains for the Alps and Switzerland used to stop
a few years ago. He remembered the buffet, the
decks, and the easy access it gave his family to
go bathing in the Bourget Lake when he was a
kid. What used to be an important place had be-
come a non-existing, undifferentiated instant
along the train path. The event here for our voy-
ager was the very fact that nothing in this station
could make this place eventful, memorable, re-
markable in any one of the passengers` lives any
more. They just zipped through with a strident
noise. More than that, the natives of this little
town who, before, had the dignity of being able
to stop the train, to board it or alight from it, now
had their town cut into two halves and could not
cross or stop the train anymore. Their ties
accross the station had earlier resembled the li-
anas of the first voyager, blocking the pathway,
forcing the voyager to make detours, to accept
delays, to wait for later trains; they now
ressembled more the open path left through the
jungle by the woman cutting trees and lianas.
This little station counted, it no longer counts. It
interrupted the trip, it no longer interrupts it. It
was a station, it is no longer a station. The rails,
well aligned, now run in only one direction,
from Paris to Geneva.
So the difference between our two voyagers
comes from the number of others one has to take
into account, and from the nature of those oth-
ers. Are they well-aligned intermediaries, mak-
ing no fuss and no history and lending them-
selves to a smooth passage, or full mediators
defining paths and fates on their own terms? Are
they more of the same that is, intermediaries
or are they really others that is, mediators?
Timing depends on that sort of ontological dif-
ference, not on the mind`s apperception. If other
entities are necessary for our existence (and sur-
prising at that), then times and spaces will pro-
liferate. In the opposite case, times and spaces
will rarefy to the point of becoming one time-
space, or even, as we shall see at the end, no time
and no space, only forms.
So we can now situate our twins along one
dimension that takes into account the ratio of
transformation over transportation or else the
number of mediators compared to the number of
intermediaries. But if we want to escape the
usual opposition between subjective and objec-
tive time, we can go further and imagine a sec-
ond dimension, so that we can obtain a richer
grid to develop our discussion of time-space fab-
rication. To define this second dimension, we
may connect our two twins` biographies in the
same scenario and insist now on the labor neces-
sary to reach one position from the other. Imag-
ine, for instance, that the woman is an explorer
sent by a company to explore the future path of
the bullet train which is, a few years later,
planned, designed, decided, built, successfully
completed, and eventually used by her forgetful
brother in his executive suit. Each locus, each
site which, before, in the pionneering old days,
Trains of Thought 177
forbade or slowed down the moves of his sister,
forcing her to age and suffer in order to make
her way, have later been turned into well-aligned
intermediaries which lend their forces, goals,
wills, or ends to the path of the train coming fast
from far away and darting as quickly as light.
Each tree, house, hut, vine, is now cut in two by
the path of the bullet train, and the train, because
of that, goes fast. Why? Because nothing inter-
rupts it, or slows it down. Speed crucially de-
pends on the number of intermediaries relative
to the number of mediators. The speed of the
train and the uneventful trip of the passenger are
entirely dependent on the complete obedience of
the places that are traversed and also, of
course, on the smooth functioning of the train
companies` organization, running, as the saying
goes, 'like clockwork.
Well, this is not exactly true, because our
story can also go in the other direction. The in-
habitants of the city that is cut in two by the line
may decide to protest and to demonstrate by sit-
ting on the tracks or even putting logs on the
rails and setting them on fire (not in Switzer-
land, of course, that would be unthinkable, but
let`s say on the Erench section!). Then what
would happen? The passengers on the train
would suddenly start to age. They would be
stuck and blocked in this hitherto meaningless
hamlet which has, because of this very revolt,
become a place, a site, what we could call an
event-producing topos. Hostages of fortune, the
passengers will start to remember the trip. They
will begin to feel the passage of time and to feel
time going slowly or fast. They will begin to
have the impression of a 'lived time and space
that they didn`t feel before when the train was
going fast, uneventfully. Buses will have to take
them away from the station and they will lose
hours because of the angry demonstrators who,
on the other hand, will have been 'making his-
tory, taking pride in their strenght, and realizing
anew that they were not living in a nowhere
place which one can cross at high speed as if it
were simply a path leading further, but a memo-
rable spot to be reckoned with, negotiated with.
To use another cliche, angry demonstrators will
be proud of having put their little village 'on the
map. Let us pursue our story to its end. Imagine
a revolt along all the points of the trip, at each
station along the railway and then also on each
of the roads taking the buses to get past the
striker blockades. What would happen? Well, we
would be back in the jungle we started with!
Each centimeter would have to be negotiated
and it would be impossible for anyone to go
straight through without being deeply and last-
ingly modified. Each transportation would have
to be paid for with a huge transformation, a last-
ing and memorable metamorphosis. (Although
my story is a thought experiment, in the Amazon
I have seen a former highway taken over by a
jungle even more impenetrable than the original
trail where Indians feared to tread).
My little story is now enriched by four situa-
tions:
(a) the woman traveler in the jungle;
(b) the man in his bullet train;
(c) the progressive passage from a trail to a
high speed railway network; and, finally,
(d) the reverse passage from a network to a
jungle where each move has to be dis-
cussed and won the hard way.
So we now have two dimensions to take into
account in discussing space and time construc-
tion. The first one that defines the ratio of trans-
formation over transportation, and the second
one that defines the relative visibilitv of the work
to be done in order to obtain a displacement.
This gives us the diagram shown in Eigure 1.
Figure 1
Making
intermediaries
Engineer
Transformation
Transportation
178 Bruno Latour
The first twin produces mediations, she sees
and feels the work of transformation and is un-
able to differentiate space and time on the one
hand, and moving bodies on the other; she does
not differentiate her own suffering body from all
the others through which she is slowly drugding
either. The engineer is aware of the mass of work
necessary to produce calculation, frames of ref-
erence, smooth transportation, but his energy is
invested in making sure that the routine institu-
tions on which these transportations depend are
running 'like clockwork. The second twin sees
no difficulty in distinguishing a moving body
from an intact frame of reference, since the work
of the others has become invisible and since no
transformation forces him to pay for his trans-
portation except, of course, the price of the
ticket. Eor him, as for all the angelic philoso-
phers of physics who play the role of the Queen
of the Night (Stengers 1996), 'time is like noth-
ing. The passenger whose train has suddenly
stopped because of the riot does not see more of
the work of mediation than the Newtonian phi-
losopher. But he feels the passage of time and
the importance of space. Aware that something
has gone wrong in the timelessness and space-
lessness of before, he concentrates his attention
on his 'lived time and space, as if this phenom-
enon were something psychological, human,
subjective. Most of the debates in the philosophy
of time will oppose the two train passengers on
the vertical right of this diagram: The one for
whom there is no time, and the other who har-
bors a subjective feeling for time. But if we
alight from the train and concentrate our atten-
tion also on the institutions responsible for mak-
ing sure that trains arrive on time, on the revolts
where space and time are decided on the spot,
and on the processes through which those institu-
tions are built or those movements are squashed
(Lolive, 1997), we should be able to add another
dimension to the debates. What are the lessons
that we can draw by thinking in two dimensions
instead of one?
Eirst, the distinction between subjective and
objective time is only part of the story. It con-
cerns only train passengers! In the notion of ob-
jective or scientific time, two entirely different
phenomena are lumped together: the routine
work of engineers inside huge institutions, and
the feeling of a user who is allowed to com-
pletely forget the work of making time because
the engineers are watching day and night over
his safe passage. Similarly, in the notion of sub-
jective or 'lived time, two entirely different
questions are confused: the surprise felt by a
user when the smooth running of time machiner-
ies is interrupted, and the labor of those engaged
in processes so little made routine that the differ-
ence between subjectivity and objectivity cannot
even be recognized. Those who explore the in-
tensity of multiple beings cannot be accounted
for by a subjective definition of an internal state.
Second, time is not in itself a primary phe-
nomenon. Time passes or not depending on the
alignment of other entities. In a world made of
intermediaries, of displacement without trans-
formation, there is a time separated from space,
an immutable frame to measure displacements
and, by definition, no process. In a world made
of mediations, of transportation by deformation,
there are a lot of times and places. Deeper than
time is the question of the obedience and disobe-
dience of humans or non-humans.
Third, the notion of event cannot be differen-
tiated into its spatial and its temporal compo-
nent. If a place counts as a no-place it also
counts as a non-event. Place is not a feature
easier to understand than time. When a place
counts as a topos it also counts as a kairos.
Deeper than time and space there is another
question about who or what counts. Which
actants can interrupt, modify, interfer, interest
which others, thus producing as many topoi-
kairoi?
Eourth, to talk like the semioticians, there are
always three shiftings simultaneously at work in
each account: a shift in space, a shift in time, and
a shift in actor or actant, the latter always forgot-
ten in philosophical or psychological discus-
sions. When I told you my little story of the
woman traveler in the jungle, for instance, I sent
you, the listener, along the three different axes at
once: at another time, in another place, but also
in someone else`s character (Greimas & Courtes,
1979). Deeper than the question of time and
space is the very act of shifting, delegating,
sending away, translating. We should not speak
of time, space, and actant but rather of temporal-
ization, spatialization, actantialization (the
words are horrible) or more elegantly, of timing,
spacing, acting.
Eifth, and finally, the question of spacing,
timing and acting should always be combined
with that of their intensitv. Is it an event or a
non-event? Process is not in itself associated
Trains of Thought 179
with time more than space. It is not the fourth
dimension, but a fifth dimension. We know that
very well, as far as time is concerned, since we
have used (at least since Husserl) the notion of
'historicity in order to differentiate it from the
'simple passage of time measured by the
watch (more of that later). But it should also be
the same for space, although there is no term as
widely accepted as for time. To differentiate the
intensity of being in a space, a topos-kairos, in-
stead of being simply located on a map, we
would need a term as clearcut as historicity.
When, as in the anecdote above, a no-place be-
comes a master place, a chef-lieu, a topos, we
should be able to say that it gains 'spacificity
with an 'a 'mediance as Augustin Berque
has proposed (Berque, 1993), or 'situatedness.
The same thing goes for the shift in actantiality.
We should be able to have a word that differen-
tiates the move from one actant to another ex-
tensive repetition from the modification of all
the actants intensive repetition. Unfortunately,
there is no such term. Since we do not have such
a triad of concepts, I would use the simple con-
trast of my little story between trail-making and
network-following, between transportation with
transformation and transportation without defor-
mation, and will use the word intensity to trace
this fifth dimension.
Writers like Bergson with his distinction be-
tween spatialization and duration, Peguy with
his contrast between the history of historians
and the history of events (Peguy, 1961), White-
head with his insistence on process (Whitehead,
1929, 1978), Deleuze with his earlier work on
difference and repetition (Deleuze, 1968), were
obsessed by this question of the intensitv of time
in contradistinction to its expansion. The diffi-
culty of using their insights to trace the fifth di-
mension of process is that they are engaged in a
battle with what they see as a scientific defini-
tion of time and space and also because, to avoid
what they see as the inherent spatialization pro-
duced by science, they always unfairly favor
time over space, as if process was in any way
more easily connected with the former than with
the latter. What I want to do in the second part of
this paper is thus to shift attention to the labor
that goes into the fabrication of spaces and times
going from the right to the left of the diagram
above so that we don`t take scientific practice
for the same thing as objective time and space; I
also want to redress the imbalance between
space and time by using work recently done in
technology studies .
Processing time and space
If I have taken the case of a train and invented
another paradox involving twin travelers, it is
not only because I am a fan of the TGV, or a
great admirer of the 'Rtische Bahn leading to
the Nieztschean valley of the Upper Engadine,
but also in honor of that most famous Swiss en-
gineer from Zurich, Albert Einstein, obsessed by
bullets, trains, and clocks. What I am going to
say should be obvious to the La-Chaux-de-
Eonds clock makers, to the Geneva train com-
pany managers, to the Zurich bankers: the fabri-
cation of a certain type of space-time-actor cru-
cially depends on our ability to measure inter-
vals by relying on bodies which have the strange
peculiarity of remaining immutable through mo-
tion: planets, falling stones, pendulums, bullets,
scales, geometrical shapes, and, of course, trains,
cars, satellites, accounts. As it has been studied
by many scholars as diverse as David Landes
(Landes, 1983), Otto Mayr (Mayr, 1986), Daniel
Headrick (Headrick, 1988), Simon Schaffer
(Schaffer, 1994), Wolfgang Schivelbusch
(Schivelbusch, 1977), Eviatar Zerubavel (Zeru-
bavel, 1985), and Geffrey Bowker (Bowker,
1995), there is in our civilization a fixation on
how best to transport something without de-
forming it, an infatuation for what I have called
'immutable mobiles (Latour, 1987). To the
search for constants, for what can be carried
around and resists deformation in spite of trans-
portation, everything will be sacrificed, even, as
in the case of Einstein`s relativity, the very defi-
nition of Euclidian space and clock-work time.
Piaget, of course, shares this obsession to the
point of having turned the ability to conserve
constants through transportation into the very
definition of intelligence and the best way to
distinguish its successive stages. As we will see
at the end, everything will be sacrificed by him,
really evervthing, to this conservation of con-
stants.
Instead of taking displacement without defor-
mation as an obvious feature of what the world
is like as so many philosophers of time and train
passengers tend to do, I simply want now to use
this rich literature on the fabrication of time and
space to free the fifth dimension of time from
180 Bruno Latour
both its subjective and objective interpretation.
How is the discussion changed when the work
necessary to construct scientific facts and tech-
nical artefacts becomes visible again? The first
thing to do is to elevate spacing to the same
philosophical dignitiy as timing.
Ear from being obvious common sense terms,
spacing and timing are in fact quite difficult to
tell apart. Through what sort of labor do we pro-
duce the difference between space and time? The
question is not as trivial as it seems. Eor instance,
the legendary wandering Jew could not distin-
guish the two, every spot along his way being also
a date. Since he never retraces his step, never
stays in the same place, never settles, never comes
back, there is no meaning for him in the notion of
'place differentiable from 'date except, of
course, the City of Jerusalem that he will reach
'next year. His itinerary would be made of 'date-
places, of a string of events. It is only because we
come back to the same place over and over again
that we generate the notion of a place, of a topos,
that lasts and stays the same, while we have
moved. The size of the castle of Chatelperron di-
minishes irreversibly in the distance as the wan-
dering traveler moves away from it. It is thus as
much part of time as the hour he spent walking
by. It is only if the walker stops and reverses his
step that the castle size reverses itself and grows
again, and, then, that the voyager can conclude
that this is a place and not only a date. It is in
comparing the irreversibility of his aging body
with the reversibility of the castle`s size that
there is a sense in the expression space and time,
as in the usual definition of space as the 'series
of coexistences and time as the 'series of suc-
cessions. 'I have changed and the castle has
not, thus there is a space, a somewhat longer
lasting landscape inside of which I move and
age, space offering the measure for time, and
time the measure for space.
According to our principle above, we cannot
say that the castle is in space since we claim that
times and spaces right side of the diagram
are generated by a certain type of work and the
displacement of certain kinds of bodies that usu-
ally remain invisible. We should say that the
voyager`s displacement, by returning, has put the
castle into space instead of time, that this type of
move has, so to speak, 'spaced it. But why does
the castle co-exist to the point of being there in-
tact, two hours after the traveler has passed to
the bottom of its mount? Certainly, this too has
to be accounted for. 'Castles in Spain, 'castles
of clouds would not have this ability. If every-
thing changed at the same tempo as the wan-
derer, he would never be able to measure the
reversibility of shape, even if he retraced his
steps. He would have aged, but the castle too
would be so different that he would never be
sure that it is not another castle, another date-
place. Even Heraclitus` proverbial river does
not flow at the same speed as its embankment.
This is where we encounter the importance of
techniques which I will define here as a very
peculiar way of folding times and actants of
different qualities and tempos (Latour, 1994,
1996).
The castle of Chatelperron, across the foot of
which the walker passed an hour ago, was reno-
vated four years ago, was built eight centuries
ago on an earth mound elevated thousand years
ago, with stones generated hundreds of millions
of years ago we will leave aside for two min-
utes the question of the measurement of these
different time scales. In other words, what
makes the traveler encounter a place, a topos, is
the connexion of actions taking place in differ-
ent sites and times by various actants. The hard
labor of the feudal villains hewing the huge
stones and putting them into place is still present
today as much as that of the ancient seas and tel-
luric activities of the geological past, and as
much as the more recent work by the courageous
owner who fixed the roof and consolidated the
walls not to mention the Neanderthal cavemen
who placed Chatelperron on the paleontologists`
mental maps. Ear from being a point in an isotro-
pic space, the 'spacific, 'situated site met by
the traveler who comes back becomes a
connexion of interactions dispersed in time,
space, and action and reassembled, kept up, in-
stituted in an event-producing topos. Because of
the ancient, enormous, and continuous mass of
work connecting various interactions over ages,
the castle still holds, makes space, makes his-
tory, breaks the continuity of vision, bends at-
tention, interrupts the travels of voyagers, and
creates hierarchies, and thus the wanderer at its
foot rightly feels that it differs from his own
fast-aging flesh. He passes, and the castle does
not. The castle co-exists, holds its ground, occu-
pies space, creates a landscape, becomes a chef-
lieu, whatever the expression, not because it is a
spot 'in space, but because it is itself the event
connecting interactions on a large spread of
Trains of Thought 181
space-time-actants. Here history was locally
made and traditions continuously kept it in
place. Thus, there is a place.
It might seem strange to define techniques as
what connects interactions from different times,
places, and actants, but this is a consequence of
our attention to delegation and shifting. Let us
take the very simple example of the mouse trap
I set up against the many mice that live in my
house at the foot of the Chatelperron castle. It
took ten minutes for Korean housewives to make
them last year in their sweatshops, a minute for
the import/export trade company to order them
by fax, three months to carry them in a container
across the Ear East trade routes. It took me a few
minutes and a few francs to buy them at the lo-
cal hardware shop last week; I am presently
hooking a portion of Swiss cheese on the nail
and, cautiously, setting the spring, making sure it
is not my finger that gets snapped by the minia-
ture guillotine... Tonight, the kinetic energy of
the spring set in place by my cautious action will
be swiftly unleashed in my absence as soon as a
gourmet mouse starts sniffing the succulent
Swiss cheese. How many actors present at once?
Korean workers, Erench traders, wood from the
mountain, cheese from the Alps, my action from
yesterday delegated to the spring in this oldest of
techniques, the trap. More primitive, more basic
than a point in an isotopic space, is this subtle
weaving together of interactions from many
places, times, and types of material: the week-
old mouse body, the month-old cheese, the age-
old trap, the five-year-old wood, the night-old
action of the exasperated kitchen owner, all of
them contributing to this very humble topos-
kairos, to an event-producing spot and it is cer-
tainly an event for the mouse who will meet its
death, hopefully, tonight ...
We never encounter time and space, but a
multiplicity of interactions with actants having
their own timing, spacing, goals, means, and
ends. Nothing in the mind, nothing, but a lot in
the know-how of those who, by clever technical
action, can weave together types of actants that
were incommensurable a minute before. What
could be farther away than Korean sweatshops
and Swiss cheese? Yet they are now connected
by the shortcut of the mouse trap. Long before
we talk of space and time, it is these sorts of
connections, short-circuits, translations, asso-
ciations, and mediations that we encounter
daily.
But how do we register these many differences
in timings and relative resistance? Through the
various instruments invented by many scientific
disciplines in the largest sense of the word to
record and document them, and this is where we
have to shift from technology studies to science
studies. In what may be the most unfair account
of science given by any philosopher, Bergson
criticized scientists for being unable to pay at-
tention to duration, to 'la duree, because, ac-
cording to him, scientists always turn it into
meaningless and timeless spatial delineations.
Bergson would have addressed the theme of this
conference Mind and Time in a much less
polite way than I, since for him there is one
thing the mind can never think of, and that is
time. Extravagant claim, since scientists are the
ones who made it possible to speak of the
'longue duree, of the eons of biology and geol-
ogy out of which the very same Bergson made
his 'creative evolution. Without Linnaeus,
without Cuvier, without Lamarck, without Dar-
win, there would be no long history of life for
Bergson to pit against the obsession with geom-
etry and space. The very idea of an evolution un-
folding over billions of years emerges out of no
other site than the natural history museums and
the collections of geologists. What Bergson puts
aside when he makes the vain opposition between
the warm and rich duration of time and the poor
and cold spatialization of mind is the work of reg-
istering differences, the work of the clever scien-
tists, another labor which philosophers have ig-
nored as much as that of the able engineers.
Let me take a contemporary of Einstein and
Bergson who has the advantage of being one of
these clever scientists inventing traps, not for
mice but for time, and who has the distinct ad-
vantage (for me) of being a compatriot from
Beaune. When Etienne-Jules Marey invented his
photographic gun to visualize at last the precise
motions of doves in flight, it was certainly not to
'geometrize the passage of time (Dagognet,
1992). It was to produce time as much as space.
More exactly, it was to produce something en-
tirely different from both which we can call
svnopticitv. In the same way as an attention to
technical know-how completely subverts the
definition of a time and of a space, since it
wreaks havoc on interactions by creating events
and topoi, an attention to synopticity, to what
can be seen at once by the gaze of a scientist,
completely redistributes the ability of the mind
182 Bruno Latour
of the scientists to know, to see, to imagine, to
think anything at all (Lynch & Woolgar, 1990).
What is important about Marey looking at the
successive images of the dove in flight im-
pressed on the circular silver-coated plate is not,
in spite of Bergson`s condemnation, that he has
lost the passage of duration, since it is precisely
to lose it that he went to great pains to invent his
photographic gun! If anything, he was utterly
fed up with 'duree, with uncontrolable, invis-
ible fuzzy patterns of doves flying in the air
without being seizable, fixable, catchable. (This
is why, by the way, he never invented the movie
camera, to the great shame of my Burgundian
compatriots; what Marey wanted was to invent
the anti-movie camera! Something that would
turn movement into a succession of images syn-
optically and not successively visible).
The flying dove did not live 'in time before
being killed by the gun 'in space. The photo-
graphic gun does not kill, that`s the trick. What
is important for Marey is that the events of the
flying dove occur now many times, there, in the
beautiful summer sky, but also, hundreds of
times at will, down there in the Station
phvsiologique of the College de Erance. Marey
is not losing the lived and rich duree of the
dove for the poor and cold geometry of the
dove. On the contrary, he is adding to the flight
of the dove, something never observed by any-
one on earth before, the enrapting contempla-
tion of the successive motions transformed, on
the plate, into coexisting shapes. He has not
'degraded time into space as Heidegger would
say; the leap is much more innovative and dar-
ing than that: the few flash seconds of the
dove`s flight have been transformed into an
ever-lasting silver photograph that can be con-
templated for hours and quickly scanned by
Marey`s gaze again and again, in search of
structural features that will explain the
muscles` position and the energy balance. Eor
someone who observes scientists at work there
is no more one time and space than there is for
someone who observe engineers at work. The
phenomena are much more stunning; they rely
on the subversion, disjunction, displacement,
rescaling, crossing-over of relations between
spatial, actorial, and temporal features (Schaffer,
1988 ; Latour, 1995 ; Lynch, 1991). Science
does not withdraw time from the world, it adds
many spaces and times to it by constantly modi-
fying scales, lengths, units in those strange sites,
the laboratory, the institute, the collection,
which are utterly different from 'a mind.
If this is the case, then, where does this obses-
sion with a time-space frame 'in which entities
would reside or which the mind would 'impose
on things in order to apprehend them come
from? No suffering bodies opening up trails
through labor, as in the anecdote I recounted ear-
lier, will ever produce that sort of space and
time. But no engineer and no scientist at work
either. And it is useless at this point to oppose, as
is so often the case, the 'lived world of human
subjectivity apprehending space and time with
all the rich colors of intentions and affectivity on
the one hand and, on the other hand, the scien-
tific and technical objective world ceaselessly
beating the isotopic and isochronic meaningless
space-time. The scientific and engineering prac-
tice of subverting spaces and times through
maps, charts, digs, traps, tricks, and knacks ex-
ceeds by far any subjective time and space de-
scribed by phenomenologists. The subjectivity
of space and time is not what is left when the
objective space-time has been thoroughly de-
scribed. It is only in some very peculiar cir-
cumstances that the two can be differentiated.
Only the man in the TGV may distinguish
transport and transformation, not the woman
opening the trail with her hatchet, not the engi-
neers of the train companies making sure trains
do not run out of synch, not the scientists
watching over the coordination of atomic
clocks, and not Marey trembling at the idea that
his photographic gun might give fuzzy, blurred
or overlapping images.
But certainly, the space-time used to imagine
the frame of all events has to come from some-
where? Its origin seems to reside in the peculiar
nature of the obfects used in the scientific disci-
plines to build their measuring instruments
(Stengers, 1996). Whitehead once quipped that
it is all very well to praise Galileo for his study
of the inclined plane, but what if he had tried
with bags of wheat instead of spherical billard
balls! Try to detect a seven-year-old conserving
from non-conserving kids using callabasses in-
stead of beakers controlled by metrology and
standardization inspectors and instruments and
institutional bodies are necessary there, as well
as in the case of trains and clocks to hold them
'up to standard and coordinate action and cer-
tification (see Houde, this volume). I bet that in
Africa, away from their laboratories, most
Trains of Thought 183
Piagetian testers would qualify as non-conserv-
ing (Lave, 1988)! As I said above, there is an in-
ordinate number of rigid bodies in the parapher-
nalia of laboratories. But this does not mean that
scientists are themselves rigid bodies or have
rigid geometrical minds! It means that, in the
laboratory, to detect differences they use bench-
marks. The circulation of those rigid bodies will
locally generate a specific type of space-time
like the circulation of any other body with dif-
ferent properties will generate other spaces-
times-actants. This does not mean that we are in
an isotropic space and an isochronic time, but
that locally, inside metrological chains, there are
effects of isochrony and isotopy, produced by the
carefully monitored and heavily institutionalized
circulation of objects that remain relatively
untransformed through transportation: high-
speed trains, rulers, standards, canons, weight,
constant relations, bullets, ballistic missiles, fall-
ing stones, accounts, and various other rods,
hands of clocks, gears, and structural iso-
morphies. All of that instrumentation, being
very practical, very clever, very material, very
local, but at no point saying anything about the
mind`s inner workings or explaining the ways by
which no-place becomes event or events become
non-event. The building of metrological net-
works for space and time is a crucial feature of
Western history. It has to be documented, to be
sure, it should be studied, respected, but it must
not be confused either with an account of how
our mind evolved, or with the understanding that
other civilizations may have of time, or with the
ontology of world-making.
I am well aware that we are here at the turning
point (or maybe the breaking point!) of my
chapter. Since this interest in the shift in times
and spaces practised by technical action and sci-
entific laboratories, and the attention on the in-
struments and their making instead of their re-
sults, cannot in any way be justified by demon-
stration, we have to choose here between phi-
losophies. The first one would consider space
and time in their isotopic and isochronic nature
as being what the universe is made of, or, alter-
natively, what the mind needs to impose on the
universe in order to make sense of it. In addition,
as an afterthought, it might save for human sub-
jectivity some other sort of relations that would
explain how we relate emotionally to events and
orient concretely in space, but all of this subjec-
tivity will be understood in contrast to the objec-
tive space-time. Affectivity and effectivity will
be clearly contrasted. Only the left side of the
diagram will be considered and the right part
will be taken as a purely instrumental aspect of
no philosophical consequence for the elabora-
tion either of the world or of the mind.
The second solution is to start from a phe-
nomenon that is not in itself connected with sub-
jectivity or objectivity, which ignores the quarrel
between space-time as sensorium or as a frame
of mind, and which begins with the other entities
that are necessary for maintaining one in exist-
ence. It is the quality of this otherness and the
'number of others which become, in this phi-
losophy, the crucial features. The key question is
thus that of knowing if a transport, a displace-
ment, a translation, a trajectory is either 'paid
for in such a world by a small or a large defor-
mation, transformation, metamorphosis. The
major difference between the two outlooks is
that, in this second view, the normal case of the
first becomes the extraordinary rare exception
of the second. That a mobile may travel without
mutating is so rare, so miraculous, so expen-
sive, that it has to be accounted for and ex-
plained in detail. And indeed, to account for the
man in the TGV who does not age more than
three hours going from Paris to Neuchtel, one
would have to take into account several huge
bureaucracies, enormous networks, many
clocks, flags, signs, and standards, a lot of elec-
tric plants, labor relations, and so on. Similarly,
to account for Einstein`s travels without defor-
mation at the speed of light in spite of the ac-
celeration of the frames of reference, one
would have to count the whole establishment of
physics, huge laboratories, most of astronomy,
and quite a lot of the trains and embankments
of Swiss railway authorities! In this second
world, the measurement of times and spaces
makes spaces and times whereas in the first, the
instrument plays no other role than that of a
practical means to reach space and time which
exist independently either objectively or subjec-
tively. In the second, instruments are mediators
and shifters; in the first, simple means and inter-
mediaries; they could, in theory, be discarded. In
both worlds, the role of the mind as well as of
ethics, politics, and religion will be entirely dif-
ferent, and this is what I now want to focus on
briefly in the remainder of this paper. Why is the
fifth dimension of time-space so difficult to reg-
ister?
184 Bruno Latour
Formalism: A professional hazard
What happens if, instead of focusing on the cir-
culating rigid bodies, on the instruments, on the
laboratory sites, on the changes of scale, on the
institutions in charge of time and standards, on
the know-how that goes into the experimental
trials, one focuses only on the results of that
smooth displacement? To continue with my fa-
vorite example, what happens when the man in
the first-class compartment of the TGV ignores
not only the famous 'man on the embankment,
but also the inhabitants of the string of aligned
stations and cities, the whole machinery and ad-
ministration of train companies? He will really
think that there is something like a displacement
in time-space that does not require any aging,
any transformation, something that is 'paid for
nowhere by any costly network building. He
may even start to think that isochronic time
(measured by his watch in relation with the
train`s clock) and isotopic space (signaled by the
number-bearing milestones that flee regularly
along the track) are normal features of the
world. Please note again, that this will not hap-
pen if he boards an Italian train, let alone an In-
dian train, and it won`t happen either, remember,
if there is a strike or any incident or even if the
air-conditioning starts to malfunction slighlty.
But if everything goes smoothly, this traveler
will take the result of the railway companies` la-
bor smooth travel across space in time as the
normal cause of that huge organization. After
having discarded as irrelevant the tracks, the
trains, the switches, the bureaus of standards, the
clockwork, the regulations, the timetables, and
the whole menagerie, he will then be immensely
tempted to believe that this whole system of iso-
chronic and isotopic coordinates could be lo-
cated, where? In his mind' That is the real great
danger of train trips, they are too comfortable, at
least in Switzerland. Epistemology is a profes-
sional hazard of first class air-conditioned train
travelers. 'Brain trips, it should be called, a dis-
ease of modernity and lack of exercise, much
like a bad back!
More seriously, science is either praised or
attacked for what it cannot possibly provide:
timeless formalism. As we saw earlier, there ex-
ist, of course, scientists working on forms, on
rulers, on maps, on coordinates, on structures,
but their work is not itself formal, ruled,
mapped, coordinated, structured. Eormalisms
circulate inside scientific networks with the
regularity, efficiency, elegance, economy, of
trains circulating on the 'Rtische Bahn. But in
the same way as no one could even imagine
trains keeping regular schedules without railway
companies, no one should imagine that formal-
isms could go on circulating smoothly without
the costly institutions known as Research and
Development. It is as strange to turn isochrony
and isotopy into mental or natural categories as
it is to turn the work of establishing constants
into what the mind would be particularly good
at. The unequipped mind of a desocialized scien-
tist will be immediately unable to prolong the
life of any constant. This is why researchers,
well aware of these practical constraints, cease-
lessly devise instruments, time and space
subvertors, data-traps, scale-inverting inscrip-
tions, and thus produce a fabulously interesting
history in their own sciences. They resemble
much more the worried train company managers
than the careless, well-fed, ignorant traveler.
Even Einstein, in his own Machian account of
general relativity, has deployed very explicitly
the engineering work that goes into shifting
from one accelerated frame to the next without
losing information on the way (Einstein, 1920).
His proverbial 'mollusk of reference produces
an absolute space-time, but cannot possibly be
seen as being itself in this absolute space-time.
The idea that a mind could make formal rea-
soning would be as bizarre as imagining a soli-
tary scientist making a discovery or a naked
male traveler`s body going by itself at 300 km/h
from Paris to Neuchtel. Only Superman or The
Elash could do that. And yet, the very idea of a
'genetic epistemology goes even further than
this thought experiment. It imagines not only that
the mind undertakes formal reasoning through
formal means, but that the whole history of bio-
logical life, from the earliest pre-Cambrian ferns
to the superior cortex of primates, obsessively
seeks nothing but the conservation of those for-
mal relations (Piaget, 1967 |1992])! Thus formal-
ism is not only taken as the pinnacle of human
reasoning, but life itself is said to aim at nothing
else. Here Piaget, the immanentist, takes appar-
ently the opposite position of Bergson, the spiri-
tualist, for whom life will remain forever foreign
to Homo fabers urge for geometry. In effect,
however, his position starts from the same prin-
ciple: Time and space can be said, unproblem-
atically, to pertain to life itself.
Trains of Thought 185
But if we have been right in locating the pro-
duction of times and spaces in certain types of
circulation, registration and instruments, one
certainly cannot attribute to life itself the timing
that is due in large part to the biologists` and
evolutionary theorists` practice (Kohler, 1994).
To stick to mollusks (of reference), there is a
huge difference between a snail in Neuchtel`s
lake, and the same snail inside Piaget`s collec-
tion. The first is more like the female traveler of
my story: It is a suffering body among suffering
bodies, without any instrument to register its
suffering, its metamorphoses, its mutations, and
all the risks it dares to take to stay alive. It is
only the second, inside a range of other snails of
slightly different colors and shapes, that will be-
gin to offer, through the invention of a new form
of synopticity, a registration of mutations in re-
lation to the changing environment, itself repre-
sented by colors, labels, lentghts on
millimetered paper. As Stephen Jay Gould has
so beautifully demonstrated in honderful life.
The Burgess Shale and the nature of historv (the
full title should not be overlooked) one cannot
account for the history of life without the history
of the life sciences (Gould, 1989). To jump away
from the instruments, the collections, the natural
history museums, straight to what life in itself
aims at, is a sure path to failure, to the fallacy of
granting to all living organisms a 'way of life,
an obsession with constancy, a mad search for
structures, a fixation on conservation, that might
well be dare I say it? representative of Swiss
watchmakers, Swiss train managers, Swiss
record-keepers, Swiss bank collectors, but that
cannot, at least without more research, be lightly
granted to snails, birds, stomachs, brains, kids,
mathematicians, elephants, or whales... One can
be allowed to forget for a moment that smooth
displacement in time and space is paid for some-
where else by other people, but not forever. Even
if 'time is like nothing during the train trip and
inside the compartment, to think that this is also
true outside of the train would be like trying to
suddenly jump out of a TGV at full speed...
Eernando Vidal has shown the paradox of ac-
counting for Piaget`s thought by pointing out its
environment (Vidal, 1994). If we were to believe
naive contextualists, a Swiss biologist born in
Neuchtel, working for many years on natural
history collections, in a rich country of bankers
and clockmakers, crisscrossed by trains, cars,
trucks, and planes, and later fascinated by the
exploring behavior of children, by the extent of
their material manipulations, their reliance on
social interactions, should have considered soci-
eties, children`s peer groups, and scientific disci-
plines as so many time-producing collectives,
and should have deconstructed, one by one, most
Western beliefs into the asocial, atemporal na-
ture of formalism. He should have wrenched out
of the mind every single one of the concepts that
rely so obviously on material, social, and practi-
cal mediations, and since he had the extraordi-
nary chance of being a reasonably good biolo-
gist, he, and he alone, not taken in by the awe of
Science with a capital S, should have seen how
close children`s controversies were to scientific
controversies. Thus, struck by the extravagant
ethnocentrism of most psychology, he would
have founded 'cognitive anthropology and
shown the gap that exists not only between prac-
tical cognitive cultures, as Ed Hutchins has re-
cently shown in his fundamental book
(Hutchins, 1995) but, going much further, he
would also have started to study what times and
what spaces suffering biological bodies would
trace on their own terms...
And yet, and yet, as we all know, this is not
what happened! Too bad for the social history of
thought! The heroic effort we celebrate in this
symposium under the paradoxical umbrella of
Mind and Time aimed at eliminating from the
mind, from the production of science, from on-
togenic development, from the history of science
and, finally, especially in Biologv and Knowl-
edge, from the history of life itself, any trace of
history, of time-producing practice. Isabelle
Stengers, a philosopher of time if any, has pro-
posed, after Deleuze, to distinguish virtualities
from potentialities. Potentiality is the realization
'in time of what was already there in potentia.
Time unfolds determinations, but nothing really
happens, exactly as it is possible to calculate all
the positions of the pendulum from its initial
position without the actual fall of the pendulum
adding any new information. The same is true of
development, if development is understood as
the unfolding of potentialities a problem, as is
well known, that Piaget tackled twice in the
growth of mollusks and of child intelligence.
Virtuality is something altogether different. It
depends on the otherness, on the fifth dimension
of process, on this quality of connection with
other actants that I took, earlier in this paper, as
the deeper definition of time and space, that is,
186 Bruno Latour
the intensity of time and space. The question is
thus to decide whether time is the realization of
potentialities, or whether it emerges from the
eliciting, the eduction of virtualities, of surpris-
ing differences.
The constancy of Piaget, during such a long
career, in seizing any occasion, in all the many
domains in which he worked, to turn virtualities
into potentialities, this constant erasure of time
and practice in all the topics he took on, is so
stunning that it requires an explanation that I am
not equipped to find but that, I am sure, we will
uncover by the end of this symposium.
My own guess is that theologv must have
played an enormous role in this adequation of
Switzerland, Western science, thought, mind,
ontogenesis, formalism, and life. The timeless-
ness thus produced had all the character of the
timelessness of a secular protestant theology.
Contrary to what is often thought, theologians
are often more rationalists than epistemologists,
especially because they imagine that God has
something to do with the same time and space as
the one produced by immutable mobiles, except
that He is beyond. But, since theologians do not
focus on the work of producing those mobiles
but only on its result, much like train travelers
and epistemologists do, they take isotopy and
isochrony as features of the world. They com-
mit, to use Heidegger`s language, the sin of
metaphysics. Thus, there is no other way for
them but to consider God as an entity which is
somewhat 'beyond space-time, in a
transcendant 'other world. If one wishes, like
the young Piaget, to maintain the anhistoricity
provided by this God of beyond and above, but
wishes, at the same time, to distance oneself
from the embarrassing baggage that goes with
Christian theology, one of the solutions is to
make sure that this world itself has all the char-
acters of constancy, formalism, anhistoricity of
the 'other world.
The enterprise resembles somewhat the ex-
periment to reach absolute zero by progressively
slowing down the motions of atoms. The fusing
together of psychology, history, life, logic, math-
ematics, and pedagogy, creates a confined space
in which this extraordinary trial can take place:
The slowing down of history, the slow replace-
ment of virtualities by potentialities, the trans-
formation of process into the actualization of
constants, one of the most daring scientistic en-
terprises of this century, already rich in such
endeavours, to make sure that how can I put
this as politely as possible? to make sure that
nothing unanticipated or untowards happens; to
make sure that every stage will be regulated ac-
cording to schedule; that ontogeny will recapitu-
late phylogeny; that this world will be as well
regulated as the lost other world; that balances
and accounts will always be kept in spite of all
the imbalances; that constancy will always be
maintained in spite of the turmoil of history and
world wars; that capitalization will go on for
ever without losses or spending... Ah hah,
maybe the contextualists are right after all, a
Swiss dream if any, the paradoxical timelessness
of clockmakers! The ideal for an army of passive
defense. A world run smoothly like clockwork,
where trains, colleges, and classrooms run on
time, a world where nothing would happen. A
mind and no time...? Yes, a magnificent experi-
ment to show in relief what has been missed so
far in discussions about timing, spacing, and act-
ing.
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