visible, it is because it has taken place—and still takes place—else-
where, inside the laboratory, behind closed doors, before the research-
ers intervene as experts in the public debate by reading in one voice
the unanimous text of a resolution on the state of the art. There are,
then, within the sciences themselves, certain procedures that suspend,
distinguish, and resume the course of the discussion, procedures that
allocate the stages of the discussion to separate houses. It would thus
be wrong to see people who do not discuss because they demon-
strate—scientists—as opposed to people who discuss without ever be-
ing able to reach agreement on the basis of a definitive demonstra-
tion—politicians.
Where are we going to find the means of buttressing, provisionally,
this capacity of speech that is intermediary between “I am speaking”
and “the facts are speaking,” between the art of persuasion and the art
of demonstration, before localizing it definitively, in Chapters 3 and 4,
within the future Constitution? In politics, there is a very useful term
for designating the whole gamut of intermediaries between someone
who speaks and someone else who speaks in that person’s place, be-
tween doubt and uncertainty: “spokesperson*.” If I speak in the name
of another, I am not speaking in my own name. Conversely, if I were to
affirm without further ado that another is speaking through me, I
would be demonstrating great naiveté, a naiveté that certain episte-
mological myths manifest (“facts speak for themselves”) but political
traditions prohibit. To describe intermediary states, we can use the
notions of translation, betrayal, falsification, invention, synthesis, or
transposition. In short, with the notion of spokesperson, we are desig-
nating not the transparency of the speech in question, but theentire
gamutrunning from complete doubt (I may be a spokesperson, but I
am speaking in my own name and not in the name of those I repre-
sent) to total confidence (when I speak, it is really those I represent
who speak through my mouth).
We have to acknowledge that the notion of spokesperson lends it-
self admirably to the definition of the work done by scientists in lab
coats. It took a really powerful prejudice to make the laboratory and
the assemblies so incommensurable for us that we had to deprive our-
selves of such a useful term: the lab coats are the spokespersons of the
nonhumans, and, as is the case with all spokespersons,we have to en-
tertain serious but not definitive doubtsabout their capacity to speak in
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