knowledged fact, you will say precisely that it is she, the scientist, who
is speaking on her own, that it is her own speech, her prejudices, her
thirst for power, her ideologies, her preconceived ideas, and not...
not what? Not the actual thing, quite obviously, not the thing itself,
not reality. The most common of all clichés in the City of Science is
that “the facts speak for themselves.” But what does it mean for a fact
to speak “for itself”? The lab coats are not so deranged as to believe
that particles, fossils, economies, or black holes speak on their own,
without intermediaries, without any investigation, and without in-
struments, in short, without a fabulously complex and extremely frag-
ilespeech prosthesis.If no one is crazy enough to declare that the facts
speak for themselves, no one says, either, that lab coats speakon their
ownaboutmute things.Or, when someone does make this accusation,
it is in merciless criticism of an utterance which then loses all claim to
fidelity, which becomes no longer objective but subjective, no longer a
factbut anartifact.We shall say, then, that lab coats have invented
speech prostheses that allow nonhumans to participate in the discussions of
humans, when humans become perplexed about the participation of new en-
tities in collective life.The formula is long, to be sure; it is clumsy and
turgid; but we find ourselves in a situation where a speech impedi-
ment is preferable to an analytic clarity that would slice off mute
things from speaking humans in a single stroke. Better to have marbles
in one’s mouth, when speaking about scientists, than to slip absent-
mindedly from mute things to the indisputable word of the expert,
without understanding the first thing about the metamorphosis that
would then look like vulgar sleight of hand. Whereas the myth of
the Cave obliged us to undergo a miraculous conversion, what is at
stake here is only a simple translation, thanks to whichthings become,
in the laboratory, by means of instruments, relevant to what we say about
them.^20 Instead of an absolute distinction, imposed by Science, be-
tween epistemological questions and social representations, we find in
the sciences, on the contrary, a highly intense fusion of two forms of
speech that were previously foreign to one another.
Before my readers begin to get the disquieting impression that they
are being pulled into a fable where animals, viruses, stars, and magic
wands are going to start chattering away like magpies or princesses, let
me emphasize that we are in no way dealing with a novelty that would
be shocking to common sense. On the contrary, it is good sense that
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