Mixing metaphors: Politics or economics of knowledge?

Mixing metaphors: Politics or economics of knowledge?

DICK PELSUniversity of Groningen and University of Amsterdam

Das Herrenrecht, Namen zu geben, geht so weit,dass man sich erlauben sollte, den Ursprung derSprache selbst as Machtau« sserung der Herrschen-den zu fassen: sie sagen ` das ist das und das,'' siesiegeln jegliches Ding und Geschehen mit einemLaute ab und nehmen es dadurch gleichsam inBesitz (Nietzsche 1887).

The new sociology of scienti¢c knowledge, and the new sociology ofculture more generally, have familiarized us with talk about the `òrdi-nary,'' ` unexceptional,'' and down-to-earth character of all practicesand products of the high intellect. No longer is science self-evidentlyseparated from the mundane social world by uniform criteria of ra-tionality, truth, and method; long-standing philosophical prerogativeshave crumbled before the insight that science is messy, idiosyncratic,and interest-ridden like other social practices. Intriguingly, this radicalidea of the collusion of cognitive and social elements in science, and ofits situated and interest-ridden production, is voiced in two classicalrepertoires of disenchantment: the ` Marxian'' one of economics andcapital and the ` Nietzschean'' one of politics and power.1 These twovocabularies disenchant and deconstruct because they register some-thing analogous to the search for pro¢t or the will-to-power as intrinsicfeatures of the professional quest for knowledge; they twice express theinseparable duality of cognitive and strategic interests and the resulting` agonistic'' structure of scienti¢c endeavor.2 In this fashion, the twometaphors appear equally useful in hastening the desecration of whatNietzsche dubbed the ` ascetic'' ideal of philosophical truth, and indisburdening science of its conventional epistemological privileges.

On the long view, the mutual relations between these master reper-toires display a curiously intricate pattern of divergence, polarization,

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Theory and Society 26: 685^717, 1997.ß 1997Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

and convergence. In a previous work, I have o¡ered a detailed histor-ical reconstruction of this ¢ssion-and-fusion movement of the mastervocabularies of political economy and political philosophy, or as I havecalled them, of ` property theory'' and ` power theory.''3 In bare out-line, the pattern is as follows. Reversing the order of priority set downby the absolutist tradition of political sovereignty, classical liberalismand classical political economy posited a sharp ontological break be-tween the realms of economic property and political power, and pro-claimed the constitutive priority of the former over the latter. Thisontological ¢ssure opened up theoretical space for an intractable re-ductionist dilemma: did power ultimately ` follow'' property, as liberalsand Marxists held, or was it the other way around, as anarchists, radicalconservatives, and many sociologists maintained. Subsequent theoret-ical developments gradually closed this gap and eased the polarity in asecular process of semantic interfusion, which commences roughly inthe middle of the nineteenth century and speeds up in the course of thepresent one.While the idiom of property has been freely generalized todenote intangibles such as shares of stock, welfare bene¢ts, copyrights,jobs, skills, political rights, and cultural competencies, the concept ofpower has similarly evolved into a generalized metaphor of the mold-ing force of all human relationships. Clearly, this converging tendencyproduces a major conceptual quandary, since the two generalizingstrategies inevitably intersect and collide, and are ultimately incompat-ible with the motive to retain either property or power as the privilegedexplanatory axis of social order and social inequality.

Without rehearsing the full analysis here, we may safely presume thatthis converging trend has again accelerated in recent times. A vigorous` economics of politics'' is currently £anked by an equally energetic` politics of economics.''4 The generalization of economic categories tothe analysis of political, cultural, and intellectual practices has becomea familiar gesture in a variety of intellectual currents, which include the` economic theory of democracy'' such as elaborated by Downs or Barry,rational-choice theory as practiced by Becker, Olsen, Coleman, orElster, neo-Marxist cultural studies (Jameson, Eagleton, Harvey), orthe general `èconomy of practices'' introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. Thealternative extension of political metaphorics is a manifest feature ofseveral in£uential branches in feminist studies (e.g., Harding's andHaraway's elaboration of ` standpoint theory''), ecological criticism andits call for a ` politics of nature'' (cf. Bookchin's eco-anarchism), Elias'sprocessual sociology, Foucault's microphysics of power and discipline,the sociology of the ` risk society'' and re£exive modernization (Beck,


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Giddens, Lash), and recent talk in constructivist studies of scienceabout a ``politics of things.'' Particularly where the analytic focus is onthe emerging ``knowledge society'' and its new culture-based divisionsand risks, the two master vocabularies appear to intersect and intermin-gle quite naturally.5

Nevertheless, even in recent analyses of culture, science, and technology,ultimate preferences still appear rooted either in the Marxian idiom ofproperty and accumulation, capital and market, credit and investment,or in the Nietzschean idiom of power and negotiation, strategy andcon£ict, negotiation and network-building. While starkly essentialistmodels of ` last instance'' determination have lost their luster, temper-ing the traditional quarrel between spokespersons for the ``primacy ofthe economic'' and for the ``primacy of the political,'' they have depos-ited signi¢cant lexical and connotative residues. Although, for example,Bourdieu's protean conception of ` capital'' is virtually coextensive withhis conception of ``power,'' and his texts on the scienti¢c, linguistic,political, and artistic ¢elds freely interweave economic and politicalmetaphors, it is su¤ciently clear that, in the last instance, economiccapital is the root of all other types of capital, that the economic ¢eldimposes its structure upon other ¢elds, and that, accordingly, it re-mains Bourdieu's ultimate ambition to elaborate a general economy ofcultural and other social practices.6 Foucault's writings provide analmost perfect mirror image of this unconsummated convergence. Hisgenealogies of modern disciplinary technologies likewise indiscrimin-ately mix economic and political metaphors, even though ultimatelypleading a shift from what is called an `èconomics of untruth'' towarda ` politics of truth,'' and setting to work an omnivorous notion ofpower.7

This simultaneous play of rivalry and osmosis is also discernible in themore general change of key inWestern cultures following their epochaldisillusionment with the organizational capacities of the state, thedownfall of the planning paradises of ` actually existing'' socialism,and the unprecedented rise of the neo-liberal idiom of market freedom,e¤ciency, and competition. To some extent, the recent colonization ofcultural and political vocabularies, practices, and domains by `ìmperi-alistic'' economic metaphors may be accounted for in terms of a reac-tion to previously dominant drives for ` politization.''8 But the recentre-emergence of a radical intellectual Right also demonstrates that thediscursive pendulum has not come to a halt (at history's end), and thatthe notion of a ` primacy of the political'' is still vigorously alive.9 More-


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over, even though little is left of the traditional Left, the work of left-inspired social theorists such as Foucault, Lefort, Beck, Haraway,Latour, and others likewise reminds us that political metaphors con-tinue in force, and that the neoliberal landslide and its `èconomizing''discourse has not arrested the interpenetration of the two rival vocab-ularies and the practices they describe.

It is, of course, a risk, as Knorr has remarked about the economic-market model of science, that such metaphors o¡er little more thancrude analogies, and are unable to delineate the speci¢city of culturalproduction with any degree of sophistication.10 While their strengthlies in demonstrating science's ` unexceptional'' nature, i.e., the basicuniformity between science and other social practices, their obviousweakness is that they fashionably substitute one term for another with-out addition of content (e.g., ` capital'' or ``credit'' for ` recognition'').Hence, the clarifying power of expressions such as ``politics of knowl-edge'' or `èconomics of truth'' remains purely negative and polemical.However, such misgivings are tempered by noting that the ``speci¢cityquestion'' is central to a ¢ne-tuned model such as Bourdieu's, whose¢eld theory of science escapes reductionism by elaborating a general-ized economics that is explicitly `ànti-economistic.''11 Even Latour,who appears more vulnerable to reductionist charges by virtue of hisClausewitzian conviction that science is `à form of politics pursued byother means,'' and that seamless webs are woven among science, poli-tics, and society, quickly quali¢es such sweeping statements by drawinga boundary between routine or ` politicking'' politics and the ``fresh''politics generated in laboratories by scientists and technologues andtheir `àctants.'' If science is politics pursued by other means, ` whatcounts in laboratory sciences are the other means, the fresh, unpredict-able sources of displacements that are all the more powerful becausethey are ambiguous and unpredictable.''12

In the following, I ¢rst relate how the two metaphors rather innocentlyintersect in some early formulations by Karl Mannheim, centering onhis celebrated lecture on ``Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon.''Asa founding father of the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim was amongthe ¢rst to emphasize the socially unexceptional nature of science, andto undertake a sociologically inspired ``depreciation'' of classical episte-mology and of ` contemplative'' thinking in general.13 The metaphorsof ` competition'' and ` power struggle'' are introduced as more or lessequivalent speci¢cations of his grounding intuition about the ` existen-tial'' determination of thought and the essential perspectivism of all


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social and political knowledge. Following this, I discuss the recentpolarization between the two repertoires, which has occurred as a resultof the switch some modern constructivists have made from a Bourdieu-inspired quasi-economic model of science toward a rather more Foucal-dian notion about the mutual implication of power/knowledge. Thisdisplacement is ¢rst traced in the work of Karin Knorr-Cetina, andsubsequently in that of Bruno Latour and his associates. I contend that,apart from the logic that forces rivalling schools of thought to (over)-emphasize the mutual distinctiveness of their terms and propositions,this switch is simultaneously governed by the increasingly self-consciousarticulation of a radical micro- and actor-oriented framework of analy-sis, which also increasingly attempts to accommodate the constitutivepresence of nonhuman actors and ` things.'' The idiomatic shift from` capital theory'' to ` power theory,'' in other words, is enhanced or eventriggered by a parallel shift from a predominantly structuralist per-spective, which remains faithful to the neo-Marxist generalization ofeconomic analysis, toward a predominantly constructivist and actionistperspective, which is more congenial to a generalized neo-Nietzscheanvocabulary of politics (see Figure 1).

In the ¢nal paragraph, I collect the di¡erent threads by arguing, onMannheim's implicit suggestion, that this recent split between the twovocabularies should be overcome, because a successful account ofknowledge production requires us to make the most of both meta-

Figure 1. Theory shifts.


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phors. In opposition to Latour, who has recently voiced strong objec-tions to the ``property-like'' or ``dispositional'' interpretation of power,I maintain that the ``dual face'' of power can only be adequately graspedif one sets to work both the possessive or dispositional connotationso¡ered by the quasi-economic model and the activist or performativeconnotations o¡ered by the model of quasi-politics. Drawing out someimplications of Mannheim's mixture, I argue that the metaphor of` having'' (knowledge) is just as informative and e¡ective as the meta-phor of ` doing'' (in this case, ` doing things with words''). If, on the onehand, it is important to avoid the rei¢cation of (knowledge) resourcesby acknowledging that all knowledge is attributed, negotiated, and` translated'' (in Latour's sense of this term), it should also be recog-nized that knowledge has a crucially important distributive aspect,that some actors ``have'' more of it than others, and are able to keep itin residence or storage in order to capitalize upon it and in£uence otheractors' behavior.

Mannheim's mixture

In Mannheim's early work, whose thesis of the ineradicable Seins-verbundenheit der Erkenntnis has been progressively radicalized by arecently resurrected sociology of scienti¢c knowledge,14 one still en-counters a more or less inadvertent mixture of the metaphors of politicsand economics. I suggest that this hesitation constitutes one of many` productive indecisions'' in Mannheim's work ^ productive, becausethey fail to resolve dichotomous issues such as micro vs. macro, nor-mative vs. empirical, or epistemological vs. sociological approachesto knowledge and science in favor of one or other traditional alter-native. In this manner, Mannheim creates intellectual space for ``think-ing together'' both poles of such traditional theoretical antinomies. Inthe present case, for example, he productively fails to negotiate be-tween the Marxian heritage of political economy and the Nietzschean(or better: Weberian) heritage in the theory of power and domina-tion.15

I ¢rst review here some early statements from 1921 to 1924, in ordersubsequently to attend in more detailed fashion to the more consistentand outspoken formulations set forth in the 1928 essay on ` Competi-tion as a Cultural Phenomenon.'' In early articles and manuscripts,Mannheim employs rather inarticulate notions of possession, appropria-tion, domination, or mastery to indicate the existentially situated and


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interested nature of thinking and the purposive or performative powerof all conceptual framing. His 1921 article on ` Weltanschauung'' sug-gests that even artistic or intuitive knowing entails ` a kind of possessionof the matter before us (ein Haben des Gegenu« ber) which allows us toorient ourselves in relation to it and to master (beherrschen) what wehave gained.''16 A few years later similar metaphors are employed inorder to draw a contrast between ` conjunctive'' and ` contemplative''knowledge, i.e., between vitally and contextually determined socio-pol-itical thought and objectifying natural-scienti¢c thought, which is de-signed to combat the hypostatization of the latter as the model ofrationality per se. Every act of knowledge, Mannheim insists,

is a speci¢c kind of existential relation to the object and founds a speci¢ccommunion, a speci¢c unity between subject and object . . . . Knowledge doesnot begin with conceptualization, which is only a late, mostly analytic phasewith reference to a condition where one already has that which is ` to beknown.'' This having is thus the extended concept of knowledge in relationto which conceptual determination is only something secondary and not atall the place of origin for the constitution of the object.17

Intriguingly, this comparison between ``narrow'' conceptual rationalityand what Mannheim calls the ``total process of taking up the objectinto the subject,'' immediately ties the ` appropriative'' connotation tothat of tactile communion, since ` touching and feeling a thing is al-ready practically knowing it.'' Tactile perception presupposes a fusionrather than a separation between subject and object; not a distancingfrom things ` out there,'' but rather ` their reception into our existentialrepository.''18 Expressions such as ``contagion,'' ``communion,'' ``touch-ing'' or ` tasting,'' which collectively describe the tactile and tacitnature of pre-theoretical knowing, anticipate not only the subsequentelaborations of Polanyi and Kuhn, but also approximate Bourdieu'snotion of the pre-re£exive sense pratique and other social-epistemo-logical (e.g., feminist) conceptions about the fundamental ` embodi-ment'' of knowledge.19

Situated, existentially bound knowledge in the Mannheimian sense issimultaneously will-bound, pragmatic, or ``directional'' knowledge. Inclose conjunction with his appreciation of the ` tactile'' nature of know-ing, Mannheim also proves to be sharply sensitive to its performativepower, to the magical power of creation and transformation of the realthat inheres in the use of language. The sociological analysis of knowl-edge hence immediately weds the economic or appropriative metaphorof having to the political or performative metaphor of doing (in the


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present case, of ``doing things with words''). Àll sociological thought,''Mannheim rather abruptly suggests, `ìs embedded in a drive forchange.'' That namings alone already possess a capacity to transformis, for example, demonstrated by psychoanalysis, which is generaltheory, but at the same time ` activity, desire to transform, and powerto transform.'' Concepts such as ``capitalism,'' ` proletariat'' and ` cul-ture'' are ` directional'' in the sense of necessarily embodying a speci¢cnormative-political ``stress'':

What concept of sociology was not complicated and constituted out of somepolitical stress (tensio)? Value-freedom is possible in sociology and socialknowledge in the sense that one ought not to praise or blame phenomena tobe described, or, in other words, that one ought to refrain from any valua-tion. But at a much deeper level, valuation cannot be excluded; namely, at thelevel of perspectivity that has entered into the formation of concepts.20

One way of translating this would be to say that, while overt politicsand manifest valuation may be methodically banned from the surfaceof the process of cognition, there still remains an unavoidable andfunctionally indispensable residue of ` knowledge politics'' in the deepstructure of concepts and theories.21

This dual procedure in analyzing the political construction of knowl-edge (ban on extrascienti¢c ` big'' politics, recognition of intrascienti¢c` knowledge politics'')22 is re£ected in Mannheim's anti-reductionistapproach to the problem-ridden relationship of knowledge and inter-est. Here he takes care to distinguish between ` immediate interest''(unmittelbare Interessiertheit) and ``mediated involvement'' (mittel-bares Engagiertsein), with the explicit purpose of emphasizing thesheer variety of socially determined structural relations over againstthe vulgar-economic tendency ``to view the entire superstructure in allof its parts as immediately connected with interests deriving from thesocial base.'' The real problem of explanation only begins as soon as itis recognized that ` every political volition is anchored in a globalvolition (Weltwollen),'' a world-view that is only mediately connectedwith identi¢able group interests and group struggles. Direct ` motiva-tion by interest'' in the social conditioning of ideas is only a partialcase as compared to the more comprehensive category of indirect` committedness' to styles of thought or to the more general intellectualcon¢guration. If the category of interest is elevated to the rank of anabsolute principle, sociology reduces itself to reconstructing the homoeconomicus, whereas it has to examine ``man as a whole.''23


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Mannheim's famous essay on ``Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon''provides a more systematic account, not only of the coincidence ofa generalized economics and politics of knowledge, but also of theauthor's careful intention to avoid the double trap of economic andpolitical reductionism. As is evident from its title, the model of culturalcompetition begins by adapting an economic metaphor to social life ingeneral, including intellectual life. Competition, far from being only amarginal or sporadic cause of intellectual production,'' ` enters as aconstituent element into the form and content (Gestalt und Gehalt) ofevery cultural product or movement.''24 Phenomena traditionally diag-nosed as resulting from immanent laws of spiritual life, such as the` dialectical'' patterning of cognitive development, may now be ex-plained in terms of social patterns and structures, such as the impactof intellectual competition and the rise and fall of (intellectual) genera-tions. This rather strong dismissal of cognitive internalism and a¤r-mation of the constitutive role of the social, however, is immediatelyset o¡ against an `ùnbridled sociologism,'' which tends to view culturalcreations as ``nothing but a by-product of the social process of compe-tition.'' Social factors such as competition, Mannheim argues, areneither peripheral nor all-determinant; they are co-determinant of thecontent of intellectual products.25

This anti-reductionism is further articulated in Mannheim's defenseagainst the criticism of ` projecting speci¢cally economic categoriesinto the mental sphere.'' Anticipating Bourdieu's notion of an anti-economistic economy of practices, he points out that actually thereverse is the case. When early political economists demonstrated theimportant role of competition, they were only discovering a generalsocial relationship in the particular context of the economic system.While the existence of the social, the ` interplay of vital forces betweenthe individuals of a group,'' ¢rst became visible in the economic sphere,the ultimate aim of sociology must nevertheless be ``to strip our cate-gorial apparatus of anything speci¢cally economic in order to graspthe social fact sui generis.'' Theoretical con£ict (das theoretische Gegen-einander) constitutes a self-contained sphere of experience, and cannotbe reduced to an immediate re£ection of current social competition. It issociology's task not only to account for the distinction between thevarious ``planes of experience,'' but also to explore their interpenetrationand togetherness as manifestations of the ``general social.'' The questionthen becomes: what is the speci¢c nature of competition as it manifestsitself in the sphere of thought?


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In answering this question, Mannheim once again loosely interweavesthe idioms of appropriation and domination. Intellectual competitionis basically about ` the possession of the correct social diagnosis (Besitzder richtigen [sozialen] Sicht),'' or at least about the prestige that its` proprietors'' may derive from it; while furthermore ` all historical,ideological, and sociological knowledge (even should it prove to beAbsolute Truth itself) is clearly rooted in and carried by the desire forpower and recognition (Macht- und Geltungstrieb) of particular socialgroups who want to make their interpretation of the world the uni-versal (o« ¡entlichen) one.'' Sociology and the cultural sciences o¡er noexception to this sociological rule; here the old battle for universalacceptance of a particular interpretation of reality is carried on withmodern scienti¢c weapons. The ``public interpretation of reality'' is a` stake for which men ¢ght;'' a struggle that is not directed by motivesof ``pure contemplative thirst for knowledge'' but by the interestedpositions various groups occupy in their struggle for power.26

Further on in the text, Mannheim becomes more frank about adoptingthis ``knowledge-political'' vernacular, and provides additional evidenceof his anti-reductionist intentions. As in his earlier work, ``politics'' isinitially broadly framed, as coincident with the activist, pragmatic, or` impulsive'' basis of knowledge, which is also suggested by the closelyrelated notion of a ` style of thought.'' Politics is simply the natural telosof all activity that is directed at changing the world. Hence one runs farless risk of going astray, Mannheim believes,

if one proposes to explain intellectual movements in political terms than ifone takes the opposite course and from a purely theoretical attitude projectsa merely contemplative internal, theoretical thought pattern on to the con-crete, actual life process itself. In actual life, it is always some volitional centrewhich sets thought going; competition, victory, and the selection based uponit, largely determine the movement of thought.17

Once again, the languages of politics and economics appear virtuallyinterchangeable as indicators of the interest-ridden infrastructure ofthought, and as critical counter-statements against the ` contempla-tive'' conception. In close parallel to the economics case, however,Mannheim immediately quali¢es his vague and extended conceptionof politics. The use of political terms should not suggest ` that mentallife as a whole is a purely political matter, any more than earlier wewished to make of it a mere segment of economic life.'' The aim is onceagain merely to direct attention to the vital and volitional (voluntaris-tische) element in existentially-determined thought,'' ` which is easiest


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to grasp in the political sphere.'' The conclusion of Mannheim's essayonce more carries a ¢rm warning against sociological reductionism ofwhatever sort. Mind and thought are much more than a simple expres-sion or re£ex of various locations in the social fabric. Social deter-mination does not abolish the potentiality of freedom groundedin mind, precisely because it makes this `ìrrational'' determinationamenable to rational analysis.28

Apart from the illustrative convergence of economic and politicalmetaphors, of the idiom of the will-to-property and of the will-to-power,there are two additional points that should be stressed. First, Mann-heim posits a somewhat vague and `èxternal'' connection betweennotions of possession and power and concepts such as prestige andrecognition, which appears accountable to his retention of a rathertraditional conception of truth. He lacks a radical conception of sym-bolic capital or symbolic credibility such as is encountered in modernconstructivist accounts of knowledge and science, according to whichscienti¢c authority arises from an immediate fusion of technical com-petence and symbolic power, and the accumulation of scienti¢c capital(the stabilization of powerful networks) is made virtually synonymouswith the accumulation of credibility and prestige itself. Instead, heremains wedded to a more traditional ``Mertonian'' conception ofrecognition as a social incentive for the selective reinforcement of` truth-seeking'' behavior. Recognition, in this view, remains a func-tional sorting machine for norm-oriented scienti¢c behavior, ratherthan constituting the ` stu¡'' of scienti¢c capital itself.29

Secondly, we must ponder Mannheim's apparent irony (if irony it is)with regard to the ``power-ridden'' infrastructure of Absolute Truthand of the urge for universalization. Here we ¢nd a similar disjunctionbetween underlying power (or pro¢t) motives and aspirations for uni-versal validity. This appears to derive from the same divorce betweenepistemology and sociology that legitimizes an apparently universal-istic conception of truth.30 In contrast to the modern relativist critiqueof science, which has criticized the universalistic drive of classicalepistemology as a form of intellectual possessiveness, Mannheim stillappears to underwrite the hegemonic intellectual aspirations of com-peting social groups as a natural fact. Their ambitions toward intellec-tual dominance go largely unquestioned, even though Mannheim alsosuggests that the struggle among di¡erent group perspectives has re-sulted in the ``genuinely modern'' insight that there exists no univer-sally recognized set of truth axioms or universal value hierarchy, and


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that we must settle for ` nothing but radically di¡erent ontologies andepistemologies.''31

Switching from capital to power 1: Knorr-Cetina

In view of Mannheim's promiscuous use of the vocabularies of politicsand economics, it is striking that the modern sociology of science onceagain exhibits a growing polarization with regard to the priority of thevocabulary of ` capital'' or that of ``power'' ^ if not to mark out rival-ling ``last instances'' of social agency and social determination, then atleast to outline preferential codes of description and explanation. Eventhough economic and political terms are ever more casually mixed byall rivalling schools, and essentialist interpretations of causal socialdetermination are in universal disfavor, ultimate preferences still remaindivided among ``Bourdieusards'' who tend to generalize the idiom ofcapital, market, credit, calculation, and accumulation, and ` Foucal-dians'' who tend to generalize the idiom of power, force, strategy, nego-tiation, and mobilization. On this point, there is a fascinating petitehistoire to be told about the trajectory constructivist science studieshave followed in the past decade, perhaps especially in France, wherethey have largely completed a transition from a (mixed but predomi-nantly) economic vocabulary toward a more exclusively political one,which to a large extent is also a switch of intellectual loyalties fromBourdieu to Foucault.

How can this new polarization be accounted for? Is it cognitively orsocially constrained, or do cognitive and social constraints, as theradical sociology of scienti¢c knowledge would lead us to expect, actin close confederation? On which distinct causal levels does this corre-spondence of the cognitive and the social operate? This gives rise to aninteresting re£exive loop, since the shift from a quasi-economic to aquasi-political register is intentionally explained by means of a method-ical coalition between cognitive and social factors, which itself may bepresented alternatively in quasi-economic or quasi-political terms. Con-cepts such as capital and power, and the broader repertoires they ani-mate, may themselves function as tools of distinction or demarcationin a contest between di¡erent scienti¢c schools ^ in this case, betweendi¡erent sociologies of science. The concept of capital itself may per-form as an item of cultural capital or cultural property, as it clearlydoes for followers of Bourdieu. Analogously, the concept of power mayoperate as a repository of power in the struggle for intellectual recog-


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nition and distinction, as it clearly does for many Foucaldians. Bothconcepts may function as (quasi-economic or quasi-political) stakes ina ¢ght for the public interpretation of reality.

In several early articles and books by Karin Knorr-Cetina, and inLatour and Woolgar's benchmark study Laboratory Life, one stillencounters a rather haphazard mixture of economic and political con-ceptualizations, as well as a strong recognition of the foundationalin£uence of Bourdieu's `èconomy of practices'' and quasi-economic¢eld theory of science.32 Bourdieu's classical study of the functioningof the ` scienti¢c ¢eld,'' which appeared in May 1975 in Sociologie etsocietes, and was translated in December of the same year in SocialScience Information, exercised an especially strong programmatic in-£uence upon both French and Anglosaxon researchers. During theseyears of incubation, the journal Social Science Information functionedas an important switchboard for Anglo-French intellectual assimila-tions, i.e., before Bourdieu's own house journalActes de la recherche ensciences sociales (founded in January, 1975) became a major presencein the French sociological world, and before Social Studies of Sciencehad established a focus for the professionalization of sciences studiesthemselves.33 Knorr-Cetina's ¢rst article in Social Science Information(which also carried important early contributions from, e.g., Restivoand Mulkay) o¡ers a ¢rst extended statement of constructivism, basedupon a model of scienti¢c agency that, as is freely acknowledged,` draws heavily upon Bourdieu.'' Both unpublished and published pa-pers written at the same time by Latour evidence a similar closenessto Bourdieu and a basic sympathy for his generalized economic inter-pretation of scienti¢c behavior.34 As late as 1981^1983, Knorr-Cetinawas still reading Latour and Woolgar as more radical followers ofBourdieu, who had usefully ` modi¢ed and re¢ned'' the latter's marketmodel of science.35

This early infatuation, however, quickly faded. Soon Knorr, Latour,and others began to wax critical of economistic models, and chose topro¢le the agonistic conception of science in more clearly politicalterms. As already intimated, one of the cognitive impulses behind theshift, apart from the ` political'' or ``competitive'' logic of distinctionthat seduces opponents to sharpen their conceptual di¡erences, wasthe intuitive rejection by younger sociologists of science of the linger-ing structuralist implications of Bourdieu's sociology, and their in-creasingly self-conscious a¤rmation of a micro- or actor-orientedmethodology.36 Even though both parties to this dispute worked at


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superseding the micro-macro gap, their emphases clearly diverge, andmanifestly in£uence their particular use of economic and politicalmetaphors. Both parties take the conjunction between structuralismand a generalized economics and, conversely, between political theoryand an actionist methodology, so much for granted that intellectualpreferences in one or the other direction tend to vary together. Butsuch conjugations must in principle be taken as arbitrary, as is illus-trated by the pairing of an economizing repertoire to an actionistanalytic framework by rational-choice theory, or by the deterministicslant of Foucault's genealogies of disciplinary power. They can beaccounted for, however, by noting a local (especially French) discur-sive context that is, or used to be, strongly dominated by a traditionof Marxian political and `ìnstitutional'' economy. Apparently, binarycodes such as these, which are implanted as ` objective possibilities'' inthe deep structure of our intellectual heritage, can be di¡erently con-¢gured in di¡erent contexts of intellectual retrieval.

There is an additional factor at play here, which similarly demonstratesthat the social mechanism of distinction never works in isolation, butis always implicated in a local situation that is also cognitively con-strained. In other words, the ` rivalry e¡ect'' is normally played outwithin pre-set and taken-for-granted binary divisions that ` dictate''alternative theoretical options in a curious admixture of intellectualarbitrariness and intellectual determination. If constructivist ` ethnog-raphers of science,'' such as Knorr-Cetina and Latour, increasingly optfor an actionist analysis of ` networks'' rather than a structuralistanalysis of ` ¢elds,'' their drift toward the political repertoire is accel-erated by a growing awareness of the heterogeneous nature of suchnetworks and the representational character of the facts that are stabi-lized in scienti¢c laboratories. Increasingly, they extend the idiom ofpolitical representation and spokespersonship to the scienti¢c repre-sentation of natural facts, in order to include ` nonhumans'' or ``quasi-objects'' with humans in the range of actorial forces that together makeup stable networks in technoscience.

Taken by itself, such talk of a ` politics of things'' once again illustratesthe sheer arbitrariness of all semantic pairings along the economics/politics axis, since the analysis of actions upon things or toward naturehas traditionally been framed in terms of property and economics,while the vocabulary of power and politics has by and large beenreserved for people and social interactions. But evidently, in the speci¢cintellectual con¢guration in which the radical actionists found them-


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selves, the language of economics had become tainted. Instead, theyfound the close analogy between political and scienti¢c representationsu¤ciently suggestive and generative to justify a switch of analyticterms. What a predominantly economic model (such as Bourdieu's)failed to explain, they held, was precisely the ``content'' of scienti¢cstatements: the way in which natural facts were ` spoken for'' and re-cruited as powerful allies by their representers in the laboratory. Thiswas the gist of Latour's incipient and still reverent criticism of Bour-dieu in 1979. More than an decade later, and less reverently, Bourdieuwas singled out in a sweepingly unfair critique of the ``poverty of soci-ology,'' which supposedly blinded itself to the homologies betweenpolitical and scienti¢c representation, and hence failed to account forthe quasi-objects and the new hybrid powers that were massively issu-ing from the laboratories.37

A curious example of one idiom struggling to emerge from another isfound in Knorr-Cetina's previously cited programmatic article that,although ``drawing heavily'' upon Bourdieu's quasi-economic model,somehow manages to ignore its predominantly structuralist slant. In anice instance of Latourian ` translation,'' Knorr-Cetina's analysis ofscientists' opportunistic ` tinkering'' actually pushes a much more eth-nomethodological and individualistic reading of constructivism thanBourdieu would support, even though it is derived from and madecompatible with a still pervasively structural-economic framework. InThe Manufacture of Science and subsequent works, she provides morecritical reviews of quasi-economic models of science, although Bour-dieu's ` capitalist market economy of science'' continues to be cited as amajor in£uence, and his work is largely exempted from the criticismsraised. Moreover, at this point in time, Knorr-Cetina does not yetquestion the market model in order to reject it, but rather to perfectand radicalize it. It is ``not as yet pushed to the limits,'' since it ignoresessential elements of economic capitalism, such as exploitation (e.g., ofsta¡ scientists by administrators), individual appropriation of surplusvalue (in terms of professional recognition, and possibly independentfrom control over the means of scienti¢c production), class structure,and alienation.38

The market model is also restrictive insofar as it promotes a rathertraditional model of homo economicus as a conscious pro¢t-maximiz-er, and ignores the larger ``transepistemic'' arenas of action, appearingto prolong an internalistic view of science that treats scientists as thoughthey still performed in a self-contained, quasi-independent system.


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Finally, by taking the correlation between the status of the informationproduced by the scientists (` hard facts'') and her or his access topositions and careers for granted, the economic model also tends torevert to functionalist explanations. Part of the thrust of present quasi-economic models of science is:

to consider power and dominance as inherent to scienti¢c undertakings. Yetby limiting the perspective to scienti¢c communities, by regarding statementsaccredited as fact as the pivot of scienti¢c endeavours, and by implying thatthere exists an unequivocal dependence between the credibility-status of theobjects produced and resources as well as positions, power and dominanceare once again ` functionalized.''39

If expressions such as these already suggest the proximity of quasi-economic and quasi-political idioms,40 they also illustrate an increas-ing sensitivity to the micro-macro dilemma and a growing unease withfunctionalist explanations. To specify the system of science in terms ofeconomic mechanisms operating within specialist communities, Knorr-Cetina suggests, `ìs to exhibit from the start a macro-level interest insocial structure.'' Her own ethnographic perspective rather insists thatsocial phenomena are speci¢ed on a micro-level, and that structuralmacroconcepts must be tracked down to the micro-episodes of whichsocial life consists. This microsocial ` ethnography of knowledge'' is setat right angles to the sociological structuralism of, e.g., Barnes andBloor.41

Distancing from economic analogies and encroachment on the vo-cabulary of politics and power is directly in£uenced by such shifts onthe micro-macro axis. This is demonstated by Knorr-Cetina's defenseof a ` situationalist'' methodology in her introduction to an importantanthology edited in collaboration with Cicourel. Of primary interesthere is her adoption of a Foucaldian notion of power over against theneo-Marxist conception of power as an ` e¡ect of structures,'' i.e., alarge-scale macro-phenomenon irreducible to interpersonal relationsor individual action. ` Translating'' Foucault in the same actionistdirection as she had earlier ` translated'' Bourdieu, Knorr-Cetina em-phasizes the former's view that power is strictly relational, that itemerges from local arenas of action, and hence cannot exist other thanas a function of multiple points of resistance. Power is pervasive as aroutine component of all microsocial interaction, and cannot be con-ceptually restricted to the body politic or to structural class relations.Foucault's ``micro-physics'' of power is thus immediately linked to apostulate of primacy of microsocial situations and the microscopic


700

analysis of social interactions. The concept of power, in other words, istransferred from the macro- to the micro-level, and more de¢nitely setapart from the economic analogy of appropriation and accumulation.Presumably it is no coincidence that this text includes a penetratingformulation of the idea of a politics of knowledge:

As the study of science has shown, to construe a certain representation of theworld is in principle always at the same time a matter of truth (correspond-ence, equivalence) and a matter of political strategy, that is of imposing one'ssay and of instituting certain consequences with or against others.42

Switching from capital to power 2: Latour and others

In Latour and Woolgar'sLaboratory Life (1979), the generalizedMarx-ian-Bourdieusard repertoire of capital, investment, and pro¢t is fromthe very outset ecumenically intertwined with the Nietzschean-Foucal-dian thematic of power, strategy, and agonism. Bourdieu and Foucaultare mentioned in a single breath as having outlined a general frame-work for a political economy of truth-as-credit, which subsumes mon-etary economics as one particular form of investment. In Latour andWoolgar's ` integrated economic model of the production of facts,'' theconcept of symbolic capital constitutes the central lever of an extensiveanalysis of the accumulation and maintenance of scienti¢c credibilityin laboratory science. The concept of credibility itself synthesizes eco-nomics and epistemology by suggesting that cognitive interests andquasi-economic calculations are simultaneous and inseparable. Switch-ing metaphors in free association, Latour and Woolgar assume thatscientists are simultaneously occupied with the rational production of` hard'' knowledge and with the ` political calculation of their assetsand investments.'' Their political competence stands at the heart oftheir scienti¢c work: ` the better politicians and strategists they are,the better the science they produce.'' There is therefore little to begained by maintaining a distinction between the ``politics'' of scienceand its ``truth'': the same ``political'' qualities are required both to makea point and to out-maneuver a competitor.43

Only a few years later, in Callon and Latour's contribution to theabove-cited anthology edited by Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel, the elab-oration of a radical actionism becomes more fully encapsulated in aNietzschean analysis of power. On the basis of Callon's actor-networktheory of ``translation'' and ` enrollment'' of allies, this text analyzeshow micro-actors transform themselves into macro-actors in terms of


701

Hobbes's political theory of sovereignty, which is simultaneously atheory of social order and social contract. Anticipating Latour's sub-sequent theme of the Modern Constitution, Hobbes's transactionalmodel is generalized beyond the issue of political representation to-ward that of the scienti¢c representation of nature and technologicalartefacts. Micro-actors become macro-actors by ``translating'' so manyother actors and entities that they are able to speak for them in a singlevoice. An actor is strong insofar as he or she is able to intervene betweenforces: power is inter-action, inter-esse, interposition between oneforce and another. Actors stabilize power relations by associating thelargest number of irreversibly linked elements: ` He or she who holdsthe equivalences holds the secret of power.''44

Latour's intriguing study of how Louis Pasteur became a successfulmacro-actor by enrolling masses of both human and nonhuman `àc-tants'' (Les microbes, 1984) and its appendix of philosophical aphorisms(Irreductions) drop economic nomenclature altogether in favor of thepolitical. Les microbes is introduced as a ``traite scienti¢co-politique,''which attempts to establish democracy on a new footing by equatingraison and force, knowledge and power. In a Clausewitzian aphorismthat has subsequently proven to be highly volatile and seductive, sci-ence is described as a ` form of politics continued by other means.'' It isnonsensical, Latour argues, to divorce Pasteur the scientist from Pas-teur the politician, as he skillfully translates himself and forges manyalliances, ensuring all the while that ultimately all displacements areattributed only to himself. The Pasteurian laboratory becomes a localewhere entirely new forms of social power are generated, which deeplymodify the ensemble of actors constituting the social world. By addingthe new force of the microbe ^ for which the Pasteurians are the onlycredible spokesmen ^ the entire balance of social forces is recomposed.This is not politics in the usual sense; but if ` politics'' means that youare the spokesman of the forces you mold society with, and for whichyou stand as the only credible and legitimate authority, then Pasteur isa fully political man.45

Here as elsewhere, an expansive conception of politics (as ` reversingthe balance of forces,'' ` reshu¥ing the de¢nition of who is strongerthan whom'') is taken to provide the best model for understanding thenew relationship between social and natural forces and the representa-tives who speak in their name. Subsequent works by Callon, Law, andothers further strengthen the associative link between actor-networktheory and the vocabulary of power and politics. Callon's program-


702

matic article on the sociology of translation and spokespersonship isexplicit in advancing it as a ` new approach to the study of power.''Callon, Law, and Rip repeat that the idea of a special scienti¢c meth-odology, of a realm where truth prospers in the absence of power, is amyth and that ` the study of sciences takes us straight into politics.''46

Concurrently, Latour also turns more self-critical about his formeradoption of the capitalist model, which he no longer ¢nds very usefulin explaining the development of science and technology. On the con-trary, economic capitalism is now better seen as simply another processof mobilization; it is tied to the power question, to the question of howthe few may dominate the many. The capitalistic metaphor employed inLaboratory Life was ` doomed from the start,'' since its authors tookfor granted ` a division between mental and material factors, an arti-fact of our ignorance of inscriptions.''47

Around the same time, Latour proposes a radical reconceptualizationof the sociological notion of power itself. In ` The powers of associa-tion,'' he further articulates the distinction between a di¡usion modeland a translation model of science, which already governed his discus-sion of the success story of Pasteur as a spokesman for the microbes. Inthe di¡usion model, the distribution of ideas, facts, techniques, arti-facts, or machines is attributed to an ` inner force'' (such as truth ortechnical superiority), an initial and residential energy that is su¤cientto displace them into ever wider circles of reception. The translationmodel, on the other hand, realizes that ` the spread in time and spaceof anything .. . is in the hands of people.'' There is no initial impetus;displacement is a consequence of the energy given to the token byeveryone in the chain who chooses to do something with it. Thisdiscussion is extended toward a defense of a ` translational'' conceptionof power and a rejection of a causal and di¡usionist conception that ispolemically identi¢ed by means of the familiar counter-metaphors ofpossession and property.48 Power is not something that one can own,have, capitalize, collect, or hold in storage (in potentia); it is somethingthat has to be made, by others, in actu. The energy cannot be hoardedor capitalized. There is a singular paradox involved: when you havepower, nothing happens; when you exert power, others are performingthe action and not you. It is a consequence, not a cause, of collectiveaction. Power, like facts, is in other users' hands.49

It is therefore meaningless, Latour holds, to appeal to an initial sourceof energy, be it ` capital'' or ` power,'' to explain the obedient behaviorof the multitudes. In a critical negation of Bourdieu's concept of capital,


703

the discursive link between radical performative constructivism and thepolitical idiom is intensi¢ed. Against sociological traditions residuallyoperating with a ` possessive'' or ``residential'' notion of power, Latoursupports Foucault's dissolution of the notion of power as ``held by thepowerful'' in favor of a conception of micro-powers that are di¡usedthrough many disciplinary technologies. His own idea of power isadmittedly ` simply an expansion of Foucault's notion to the manytechniques employed in machines and the hard sciences.'' Latour goesso far as to predict a similar fate for the notion of power as he hadearlier recommended for the concept of capital: it should quite simplybe abandoned. Power and Society must go, in order to make room forthe study of associations. However, this ultraradicalism is not sus-tained in his subsequent writing, and had better be read as an index ofhis exasperation with the possessive and causal connotations thatremain central to the model of di¡usion.50

In his most recent works, Latour has generalized these novel analysesof knowledge politics and of the powers of technology in the directionof a sweeping claim for the renewal of social theory and politicalphilosophy.51 Building upon Shapin and Scha¡er's rendition of thehistorical dispute between Hobbes and Boyle in Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), this claim is directly centered upon the intriguing rela-tionship between political and scienti¢c representation. Hobbes, theinventor of the political Leviathan, and Boyle, the inventor of modernlaboratory science, are staged as co-inventors of a new ` political con-stitution of truth'' that has increasingly succeeded in dominating ourpresent-day world. This Modern Constitution maintains a sharp di-chotomy between the representation of citizens through the medium ofthe socio-political contract and the representation of things throughthe medium of experimental science. Hobbes and Boyle belong togetherbecause they were the ¢rst to a¤rm this historical separation fromtwo sides, the one by designing a scienti¢c politics that could nolonger accommodate the results of experimental natural science, theother by designing a discourse about science from which politics wasentirely banned. It is this Great Divide between Society and Nature,between the construction of (political) society and the construction ofnatural facts that still de¢nes the modern world, even though in factthe mixtures and hybrids between the human and the nonhuman,between culture and nature, and between science and politics haveproliferated so massively as to threaten continually the Modern Con-stitution itself.


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This is not the place to dissect the complex dialectical texture ofLatour's idea of the Modern Constitution.52 The point I wish to makehere is merely lexicographical. Predictably, it concerns the distancetravelled from the quasi-economic model and the ¢nal adoption of afully developed political vocabulary. The invention of the Modern Con-stitution is described as a double political intervention, as the foundingof a new ``government'' or ` regime.'' That the representation of non-humans goes to science, and that of humans to politics, is interpretedas one and the same innovation in political theory ^ a divorce thatmust soon be rescinded by once again reuniting the two branches ofpolitics and the two sets of representatives. As in Hobbes (or Aristotle,for that matter), no clear-cut separation is undertaken between thequestion of social order and that of political order, and between thejurisdictions of social and political theory: the Hobbesian question ofsocial order (What is the glue? What holds society together?) simulta-neously addresses the essence of politics and the essence of society.

Cultural resources: Toward an inclusive approach

In previous sections, the constructivist switch of register from quasi-economics to quasi-politics has been described in inseparably dualterms: as a vehicle of intellectual polarization and distinction, and asa corollary of the movement from a predominantly structuralist andmacro-level perspective toward an emphasis upon a micro-perspectiveon heterogeneous networks that increasingly acknowledges the constit-utive presence of technological ``hybrids'' or ``things.'' Both in Bourdieu,and in Knorr-Cetina and Latour, elective a¤nities were found betweena structuralist ontology and a more ` residential'' or ` dispositional''conception of knowledge-as-property (or capital) on the one hand,and actionism and a more active or performative conception of knowl-edge-as-power-exercise on the other. Somehow, in this particular so-cio-cognitive context, the opposition between economic and politicalmetaphors was ` drawn in'' by the micro-macro antinomy. Mannheim'searly work, on the other hand, was retrieved for the express purpose ofneutralizing the residual impact of such ` last instance'' polarizations.53

I have attempted to suggest throughout that lingering preferences forone or another discursive register are intellectually arbitrary, at leastwhen employed in the analysis of cultural holdings and doings, notonly because both vocabularies are surprisingly elastic, but also be-cause any inclusive account precisely requires a close meshing of boththe ``dispositional'' and the ``performative'' lexicon.54


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A fruitful way to pursue this conceptual mixture is to look brie£y at aninteresting discussion of the Rawlsian theory of justice, in which thecontrasting idioms of ` having'' and ` doing,'' of possession and action,are marshalled in the service of a general critique of rei¢cation. IrisYoung's criticism of what she terms the ``distributive'' paradigm ofjustice highlights its alleged bias toward the allocation of readily iden-ti¢able material resources (such as things, income, and jobs), and itscomparative neglect of less easily measurable, nonmaterial resourcessuch as culture, decision-making power, and social opportunities. Thedistributive paradigm, in her judgment, is rooted in a misleading socialontology that, by focusing upon end-state patterns rather than socialprocesses, rei¢es aspects of social life better understood as a functionof rules and relations. Rights and opportunities, for example, are notfruitfully conceived as possessions, because they are relationships, notthings; they refer to ` doing'' more than to ` having.'' Self-respect, like-wise, although conditioned by the access to certain distributable mate-rial goods, is not detachable from persons as a separable attribute; it` names not some possession or attribute a person has, but her or hisattitude toward her or his entire situation and life prospects.''A partic-ularly clear case of misleading connotations is o¡ered by the distrib-utive notion of power, which conceptualizes it `às a kind of stu¡possessed by individual agents in greater or less amounts,'' and thusobscures the fact ` that power is a relation rather than a thing.'' Youngconcludes this argument by pleading a general shift in the theory ofjustice from a focus on distributive patterns to issues of participationin deliberation and decision-making, which renders the conception ofjustice coincident with a rather inclusive conception of the political.55

The merit of Young's discussion is that she once again clearly alignsnotions of distribution, materiality, and rei¢cation with the vocabularyof (static) possession, while in turn embedding notions of nonmater-iality, relationism, action, and process in a generalized vocabulary ofpower and the political. In this respect, her approach well ¢ts in thelong wave in social and political theory that, in the course of the presentcentury, has progressively erased the vestiges of ` substantialist'' think-ing in favor of a ``relationist'' social-scienti¢c methodology.56 But acloser inspection of di¡erent contributions to this current of thoughtclearly demonstrates that the connotational links among a distributivemodel, material resources, and rei¢catory tendencies are just as spu-rious or contingent as the links among actionism, nonmaterial values,and the vocabulary of politics and power. In Mannheim's early work,as we noticed, a relationist sociology of knowledge was considered


706

perfectly compatible with both the vocabulary of appropriation andthat of domination or empowerment. In Elias's writings, a processualmethodology is wedded to an encompassing theory of social power;Bourdieu just as easily connects it with a generalized vocabulary ofcapital accumulation. Young proposes a de¢nitional contrast betweencultural and power resources on the one hand and ` holdings'' or` goods''on the other; but others see no principled reason why conceptssuch as appropriation or distribution cannot be extended to nonmate-rial values, while denying the concomitant inevitability of reifyingsocial relations and institutional rules.

Bourdieu's di¡erentiated view of cultural capital may be adduced inorder to illustrate such a distributive but non-rei¢catory approach. Cul-tural capital, in his conception, exists in three main states: the embod-ied, the objecti¢ed, and the institutionalized state.57 Among these, theembodied or incorporated state is seen as most fundamental, sincecultural ``havings'' or ` goods'' adopt the form of durable dispositionsof the organism that are formed by cultural inheritances, realizedthrough both kinship and formal education. The accumulation anddaily unkeep of cultural capital in this state invariably requires a per-sonal labor of investment and acquisition. It is intrinsically tied to theperson in his or her biological singularity, and hence cannot be instan-taneously transmitted by either gift or bequest, purchase or exchange.In the objecti¢ed state, cultural capital takes the form of ` external''cultural goods (such as texts, paintings, maps, dictionaries, instruments,buildings), which are appropriable and transferable in their materiality;but their conditions of appropriation (cultural consumption) are suchthat they continue to be dominated by the laws of transmission ofincorporated capital. A third form is objectivation in the institutionalizedstate, where cultural capital assumes the form of titles of cultural com-petence (e.g., academic quali¢cations), which furnish their bearers with acontinuous, legally sustained social value that is relatively autonomousvis-a© -vis the e¡ective cultural capital existing at any given moment.

Others, such as Barnes and Law, similarly favor a distributive anddiscretionary approach to issues of knowledge/power, while combin-ing it with aspects of the nominalist model of power defended by, e.g.,Foucault and Latour. For Barnes, society is essentially a distributionof knowledge, and power an aspect of that distribution. Althoughpower is embedded in society as a whole, discretion in its use is usuallydistributed more selectively. Social power ` is possessed by those withdiscretion in the direction of social action''; gains and losses in the


707

possession of such discretion are e¡ectively gains and losses `ìn theagent's capacity to act through the bodies of others.'' But this is not toslide back into an emanationist or rei¢catory conception of power;capacity for social action actually lies ` outside and beyond'' the power-holder; it is only discretion in its use that is strongly concentrated atthe higher levels of society.58 Law likewise insists that the ` storage'' or` discretionary'' conception of power is quite compatible with a radicalrelationism: relations and capacities are indissolubly linked. Powerstorage characteristically occurs at the points of high density, the stablenodes of relation networks. The question then becomes: how are rela-tions maintained or stabilized long enough to generate power e¡ects?Provisional answer: one of the best strategies for doing so is to embodythem into durable materials.59

According to these views, the relationist routine of demarcating thenotion of power against metaphors of thing-like possession or quasi-economic capitalization60 su¡ers from an important conceptual re-striction. Of course, those who ``hold'' or ` have'' power are cruciallydependent upon the attributive, performative action of others downthe chain of command; in this sense, power is ` made''of the wills of thepowerless. But even though there exists no inner force from whichpower is di¡used, and all action must be ` translated'' by others, thereis still energy hoarded (or capitalized) at the beginning that may bepreserved, if not entirely intact, throught the subsequent action. Thepower-less do modify or de£ect it, but not `ùnder conditions of theirown choosing.'' If ` the spread in time and place of anything is in thehands of people,'' as Latour rather tautologically states, some peopleare obviously better placed than others to guarantee this spread, whilesome actors are more freely capable than others to redirect the £ow ofpower according to their own purposes and projects. It is thus a de¢niteexaggeration to say that ` the initial force of the ¢rst in the chain is nomore important than that of the second, or the fortieth, or of the fourhundredth person,''61 even though each and every actor must add hisown little extra to the action to make it work. In this fashion, the` storage'' conception of power (and knowledge) and the language ofpossession and accumulation restore the crucial aspect of the stabiliza-tion of social ` doings'' into di¡erential ``holdings,'' which is tendentiallylost in radical actionist and relational models.62

This may su¤ce to suggest the ¢rst lineaments of a comprehensivemodel that strives to accommodate the true heterogeneity and com-plexity of cultural havings and doings. We need to draw the full spec-


708

trum of resources and strategies that sustain cultural property andpower, (see Figure 2), even while recognizing the eventuality that thefull tissue of cultural disposition cannot be adequately characterizedby a mere mixing of the two metaphors. This dispositional spectrumruns all the way from access to ` external'' material goods (such asbuildings, o¤ces, books, pictures, laboratory equipment, and tele-phone and computer networks), ``property'' of jobs or professionalpositions and ensuing income rights, educational titles, technicalcapacities and skills (practical dexterities, linguistic competences),toward ``goods'' the utility of which is more decisively dependent uponrecursive performative recognition (e.g., reputations of universities,laboratories, schools of theory, individual intellectuals). It registers thestrategically mediating function of internalized or embodied cultureand knowledge, which is insu¤ciently captured by the ` externalist''connotations of the traditional vocabularies of both property andpower. As Bourdieu insists, the spinal cord of cultural capital is locatedin the disposition over nonmaterial incorporated goods, which strong-ly governs the conditions of appropriation of other relevant resources,both material and immaterial (in a sociological version of the Lockeanright to ``property of one's own self''). Since it is not divorceable fromnatural persons, cultural disposition amounts to ` less'' than traditionalprivate property of external, separable objects; but it also ` more'' thanpower, understood in its traditional sense as the command over otherpeople's actions; it is simultaneously command over one's own self.The speci¢city of cultural disposition thus appears to reside in amalga-mated property and power chances that are dominated by the closuremechanisms of incorporated cultural capital.63

This wide spectrum of havings and doings not only displays the rela-tive ``hardness'' or material stability of cultural appropriations, butsimultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) their essential ` softness''or precariousness, which results from the fact that they must be cease-lessly instantiated through the performative power of de¢nition and

Figure 2. Spectrum of resources and strategies sustaining cultural property and power.


709

recognition. From opposite points of departure, both the transitive/distributive and the intransitive/performative meanings reach out acrossthe entire di¡erential continuum and its various nodes of durability andstabilization. While recognizing the relational, institutional, sociallyconstructed nature of virtually all ` material'' goods (which, for onething, must be perpetually rede¢ned and reconstituted as ` goods''rather than ` bads''), it also accommodates the distributive quality ofattributes or properties that are indissolubly linked to natural persons(skills, stocks of knowledge, reputations etc.). In pressing home thetwin analogies of economics and politics, it both emphasizes the per-formative magic of instituting objects and subjects, and the distributivequality of even the most ethereal and de¢nition-dependent forms ofcultural capital. In this respect, all resources along the continuum aresimultaneously external and internal, hard and soft, thing-like andcredibility-dependent, although they are so in di¡ering proportions.Indeed, if the true nucleus of cultural havings and doings is the para-doxical mix of hardness and softness, of stability and ephemerality,which de¢nes the habitus, and cultural resources derive a crucial spe-ci¢city from their being inscribed in human bodies, it may be here,also, that the mixed metaphors of capital and power, of having anddoing, run up against their limits and ultimately fail to grasp the thingin the middle.

Notes

1. ` It was Nietzsche who speci¢ed the power relation as the general focus . . . ofphilosophical discourse ^ whereas for Marx it was the production relation''(Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and OtherWritings 1972^1977, ed. Colin Gordon (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1980), 53).

2. The epistemological coincidence of truth-oriented, cognitive interest (Dutch: belang-stelling) and strategic interest (Dutch: belang) is far better captured by the Englishinterest or the French intereª t/interessement than by the Dutch adjective belang-rijk.

3. Dick Pels,Macht of eigendom? Een kwestie van intellectuele revaliteit (Amsterdam:Van Gennep, 1987); Property or Power? A Study in Intellectual Rivalry, revisedEnglish edition (forthcoming NewYork: Guilford Press).

4. Cf. Anton Hemerijck, ` De politiek van de economie,'' Beleid & Maatschappij 5(1994): 229^245; Ralph Miliband, ` Introduction,'' in idem, editor, Reinventing theLeft (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994): 8¡.

5. Cf. Nico Stehr,Knowledge Societies (London: Sage, 1994), passim.6. This is accomplished in part by means of an extremely wide proliferation of the

capital metaphor. As latest additions we may list: bureaucratic or party-apparatuscapital (Pierre Bourdieu, ` Proofreading,'' Poetics Today 12/4 (1991), 625^626); in-formational capital, and statist or political capital (idem, ` Rethinking the State:Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,'' Sociological Theory 12/1 (1994):


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1^18). ` Capital'' and ` power'' are treated as synonyms in Bourdieu, ` The Forms ofCapital,'' in John G. Richardson, editor,Handbook of Theory and Research for theSociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 243; and Bourdieu,Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press,1991), 230. On this basis,Wacquant justi¢ably characterizes Bourdieu's intellectualenterprise indi¡erently as a ` political economy of symbolic violence'' or a ` politicalsociology of symbolic forms'' (Lo|« c J. D. Wacquant, ` On the Tracks of SymbolicPower: Prefatory Notes to Bourdieu's `State Nobility,' '' Theory, Culture, and Society10 (1993), 2^3). But in the same texts, Bourdieu also rea¤rms the ` last instance''determination of capital and the economy in no uncertain terms (``The Forms ofCapital,'' 252; Language and Symbolic Power, 230). In addition, the ` primordial''social space (which encompasses all other ¢elds in terms of an ontological boxes-within-boxes model) is preferably de¢ned as the ``¢eld of class relations'' (cf.Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 230; The Field of Cultural Production,ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 37^40).

7. E.g., Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 93, 98, 107¡. For a broader perspective, see DickPels, ` The Politics of Critical Description. Recovering the Normative Complexityof Foucault's pouvoir/savoir,''American Behavioral Scientist 38/7 (1995): 1018^1041.

8. Cf. Gerard Radnitzky and Peter Bernholz, editors, Economic Imperialism. TheEconomic Method Applied Outside the Field of Economics (New York: ParagonHouse, 1987); Cees Schmidt, `Òver de economisering van het wereldbeeld,''Amster-dams SociologischTijdschrift 18 (1991): 79^99.

9. Cf. the intriguing swerve of the leftwing journal Telos from Gramscianism towardsan acceptance of this ` last instance'' theorem, and its concurrent fascination forthe writings of Carl Schmitt and Alain de Benoist. In his introduction to a specialissue on the French New Right, Telos editor Paul Piccone considers both Sovietbureaucratic centralism and Western liberal technocracy as ` variations of the samebasic Enlightenment model ^ a model which, by de¢ning all con£icts in economicterms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyondlabor/capital con£icts and predicated on the political power obtaining between therulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the admin-istered'' (Paul Piccone, ``Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or aNew Political Paradigm?'' Telos 98^99 (1993/94), 8^9). In the same issue, Langiullidocuments the persistence of the leftwing view that `èverything is political'' in acritical review of Gottlieb (ed.) (Nino Langiulli, ` Radical Philosophy or New ClassIdeology?'' Telos 98^99 (1993/94): 271^286).

10. Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (New York: The PergamonPress, 1981), 71; idem, ` Scienti¢c Communities or Transepistemic Arenas of Re-search? A Critique of Quasi-Economic Models of Science,'' Social Studies of Science12 (1982), 106).

11. E.g., Bourdieu, Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993), 1; idem, Language andSymbolic Power, 243^248; idem, ` The Forms of Capital''; idem, The Field of Cul-tural Production, 74^111.

12. Bruno Latour, ` Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise theWorld,'' in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, editors, Science Observed (London: Sage, 1983), 167^168. Latour's rejoinder to the conventional charge of confusing power and reason,might and right, politics and science, is that it rests upon a ` misunderstanding''over the notion of force: ` `Force' looks very di¡erent when it is considered inopposition to reason, and when it is seen as what designates the complete gradientof resistance where reality is tested (. . .). `Pure force' is an expression that takes


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meaning only because it is opposed to àrgumentation,' `rationality,' òbjectivity,'`rational discussion' and so on. It is devoid of any meaning once this contrast isremoved and when a gradient of forces is allowed to settle.When such is the case,arguments also have some force; logical connections are not without strengtheither; legal barriers exert some pressure as well; taboos seem to have quite a lot ofclout also.When the two extremes ^ pure might and pure right ^ are forgotten, allthe relations of force may start to unfold. Thus, in order to study the way reality isbuilt through trials of resistance, it is necessary not to make any a priori distinctionbetween might and right'' (Latour, ` Clothing the Naked Truth,'' in H. Lawson andL. Appignanesi, editor, Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Post-modernWorld (Lon-don:Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989), 112).

13. Cf. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1952), 137^138.

14. Michael Lynch, Scienti¢c Practice and Ordinary Action (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993); Dick Pels, ` Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scienti¢cKnowledge. Toward a New Agenda,''Sociological Theory 14/1 (1995): 30^48.

15. Cf. David Kettler,Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, ` Rationalizing the Irrational: KarlMannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals,''American Journal ofSociology 95/6 (1990), 1470; Pels, ``Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scienti¢cKnowledge.''

16. Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. Kurt H. Wol¡(Berlin & Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1964), 138. For the present translation, see DavidKettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (London & New York:Tavistock, 1984), 50, which however omits Mannheim's reference to aesthetic orintuitive receptivity. The current English translation (Mannheim, Essays, 71) doesneither render the ` appropriative'' connotation nor the connotation of ` command''or ``mastery.''

17. Karl Mannheim, Structures of Thinking (London, Boston & Henley: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1982 [1922]), 187.

18. Mannheim, Structures, 188.19. Cf. Bourdieu,Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1970); idem, ` The Forms of Capital,''

in John G. Richardson, editor,Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociologyof Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986): 241^258; Steve Fuller, SocialEpistemology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Donna Haraway,Symians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Associa-tion Books, 1991); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Di¡er-ence in Contemporary Feminist Theory (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994).A general critique of the related notion of ``practice'' as the deeply elusive ` vanishingpoint'' of twentieth-century philosophy is provided by Stephen Turner, The SocialTheory of Practices. Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1994).

20. Mannheim, Structures, 199^200, 203, 247.21. Here as elsewhere, when setting forth his basic position on the problem of value-

freedom and emphasizing the ` political'' nature of existentially bound thought,Mannheim follows a ` Weberian'' conjugation in closely identifying politics, volition,and valuation (e.g., Mannheim, Essays, 209^210, 219).

22. Cf. Dick Pels, ` Knowledge politics and anti-politics: Toward a critical appraisal ofBourdieu's concept of intellectual autonomy,'' Theory and Society 24 (1995): 79^104.

23. Mannheim, Structures, 273-276; idem, Essays, 183^184. ``Thus, the construction ofa sociology of knowledge can be undertaken only by taking a circuitous route


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through the concept of the total system of a world outlook (through culturalsociology). We cannot relate an intellectual standpoint directly to a social class;what we can do is ¢nd out the correlation between the `style of thought' underlyinga given standpoint, and the ìntellectual motivation' of a certain social group''(ibid., 184). Cf., on Mannheim's nonreductionist two-step methodology, alsoMichael Lynch, Scienti¢c Practice and Ordinary Action, 67^68.

24. Mannheim, Essays, 191. Although the proposition that competition is a constitu-tive factor of mental life is initially presented as a Sachfeststellung (Karl Mann-heim, ` Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen,'' in Volker Mejaand Nico Stehr, editors,Der Streit um dieWissenssoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1982), 329), its ` depreciatory,'' desublimating tendency ^ equally rendered by thepolitical metaphor ^ immediately turns it into an evaluative and polemical propo-sition. The written text already suggests the necessity of ultimately transducing thequaestio factis posed by the sociology of knowledge into an epistemological quaes-tio juris (ibid., 366^67; Essays, 226^227). In the ``Leitsa« tze'' that Mannheim pref-aced to the lecture itself, the signi¢cance of intellectual competition is more clearlyplaced in a normative context: ` positive values'' such as the promotion of a sponta-neous division of labor, the creation of dynamic intellectual positions, and theprevention of scholasticism are explicitly balanced against ` negative values'' suchas the danger of a total dispersion of world views, the predominance of suggestivecompetition, and the encumberment of the co-operative organization of research(` Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz,'' 327). Nevertheless, Mannheim's primary con-cern is to counter defensively the `ùnconditionally negative'' evaluation of existen-tially bound thinking that results from a one-sided orientation to the natural-scien-ti¢c paradigm; while he also verges on essentialist phraseology when demandingthat one acknowledges the ` innersten Eigenart'' of this type of thought (ibid., 327,331).

25. Mannheim, Essays, 192^193. It is not implausible to assume that ` reality'' consti-tutes another determinant of the process of knowledge formation.This position canbe contrasted with that of constructivists such as Latour or Woolgar, who insistthat scientists normally direct their activities not (so much) toward ``nature'' or` reality'' but to the agonistic ¢eld; and that Nature and Reality are by-productsrather than predeterminants of scienti¢c activity (SteveWoolgar, Science: TheVeryIdea (London: Tavistock, 1988), 3); Bruno Latour, ` The Impact of Science Studieson Political Philosophy,'' Science, Technology, and Human Values 16/1 (1991), 8.Mannheim's position appears closer to that defended by Bloor (against Lynch)concerning the simultaneity of representational and self-referential aspects of sci-enti¢c discourse: ` We must simultaneously negotiate our handling of things andour handling of people. Metaphorically we function on two channels at the sametime'' (David Bloor, ` Left and Right Wittgensteinians,'' in Andrew Pickering, editor,Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992),279).

26. Mannheim, Essays, 196^198. In this passage, the German original has ` o« ¡entlich,''although subsequently the expression ` universell'' is used in the same context (idem` Die Konkurrenz,'' 334, 344^345).

27. Essays, 212.28. Ibid., 228^229.29. Cf. Karin Knorr-Cetina, ``Producing and Reproducing Knowledge: Descriptive or

Constructive?'' Social Science Information, 16: 6 (1977), 690n; idem,TheManufac-ture of Knowledge, 70^71.


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30. Mannheim continually hesitates about the precise relationship between epistemologyand sociology. In the text under analysis, epistemology is initially divorced fromsociology (and questions of value from questions of fact), only to be subsequentlyreconnected in what could be described as a ` social epistemology'' (cf. Essays, 222^227; idem, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 [1936]):1¡). For a Mannheim-inspired defense of social epistemology, see Pels, ` KarlMannheim and the Sociology of Scienti¢c Knowledge.'' Mannheim explicitly re-tains a normative conception of truth, although he consistently argues against theself-image of epistemology as a ` Fundamentalwissenschaft'' (` Die Konkurrenz,''367^368), and views truth (in the manner of Bourdieu) as emerging from the criss-crossing censure of interested intellectual competition (cf. clearly ibid., 326).

31. Essays, 207. At this point, one may recall Mannheim's stated sympathy for CarlSchmitt's criticisms of liberal intellectualism and its axiomatic defense of the strictneutrality of science (ibid., 216^217; Ideology and Utopia, 110). Although Mann-heim admits that irrational elements are ` woven into the very texture'' of existen-tially determined thought, we should be careful not to read this as a sell-out toirrationalism; indeed, the present text concludes with a famous call for ` ration-alizing the irrational'' (Essays, 229; cf. Kettler at al., ` Rationalizing the Irrational'').For a historical perspective on some peculiar connections between Mannheim'sleftwing sociology and contemporary ` conservative-revolutionary'' thought, seeDick Pels, ` Missionary Sociology Between Left and Right,'' Theory, Culture, andSociety 10/3 (1993): 45-68.

32. Cf. Knorr-Cetina, ` Producing and Reproducing Knowledge''; The Manufacture ofKnowledge ; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar Laboratory Life. The Social Con-struction of Scienti¢c Facts (London: Sage, 1979). Especially acknowledged areBourdieu'sEsquisse d'une theorie de la pratique (Gene© ve: Droz, 1972) and its revisedEnglish edition Outline of a Theory of Practice (Canbridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1977), as well as his in£uential articles on the ``Speci¢city of the Scienti¢cField'' (Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2/3 (1976): 88^104; English trans-lation Social Science Information 14/6 (1975): 19^74, and ``The Production ofBelief'' (Actes 13 (1977): 3^43, English translation Media, Culture, and Society 2/3(1980): 261^293).

33. As early as 1969, the journal had published an English translation of Bourdieu'sstudy `Ìntellectual Field and Creative Project'' (Social Science Information 8(1969): 89^119), which largely anticipated his analysis of the scienti¢c and artistic¢elds. In 1977, it printed his equally generative study of the linguistic ¢eld (PierreBourdieu, ` The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,''Social Science Information 16(1977): 645^668).

34. One is entitled Àccumulation and circulation of scienti¢c credit. A model forguiding a comprehensive sociology of science'' (mimeo Salk Institute 1977, cit.Knorr-Cetina, ``Producing and Reproducing Knowledge,'' 695). Another at thetime unpublished piece, ` Le dernier des capitalistes sauvages'' is reprinted inLatour's La clef de Berlin et autres lec° ons d'un amateur de sciences (Paris: LaDecouverte, 1993): 100^129. In 1977, Latour and Fabbri published a joint paper inBourdieu's journal Actes, in which economic and political terms are mixed in animage of the ` agonistic'' of science that clearly anticipated the argument of Labo-ratory Life (still announced for 1978 as Science in the Making). Although theauthors advise that `Ìl est temps d'etudier la science du point de vue d'une econo-mie generale du credit, en appelant credit a© la fois, le capital-argent, le capital-autorite, le capital-donnees et l'accreditation,'' Latourian preferences for a more


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` military'' vocabulary, at once closer to rhetoric and semiotics, already shinethrough (B. Latour and P. Fabbri, ` La rhetorique du discours scienti¢que,''Actesde la recherche en sciences sociales 13 (1977): 81^95).

35. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, 70^71; idem, ` The EthnographicStudy of Scienti¢c Work: Towards a Constructivist Interpretation of Science,'' inKarin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, Science Observed (London: Sage, 1983),129). Compare this to Knorr's subsequent harsh comment, seconding Latour, thatBourdieu's sociology of science ` is orthogonal to, and beside the point of, the mostinteresting developments in recent sociology of science'' (Werner Callebaut,Takingthe Naturalistic Turn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 473^474.

36. Instances of Bourdieu's residual structuralism and objectivism are scatteredthroughout his work (e.g., Bourdieu, ` Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduc-tion to a Japanese Reading ofDistinction,''Poetrics Today 12/4 (1991): 627^638; cf.Pels, ``Knowledge politics and anti-politics'').

37. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 206; Bruno Latour,We Have Never BeenModern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5^6, 51, 54. See also note 34.

38. Knorr-Cetina, ` Producing or Reproducing Knowledge?''; idem, ` Scienti¢c Com-munities,'' 105^106;The Manufacture of Knowledge, 71.

39. ` Scienti¢c Communities,'' 110.40. Note also that Latour and Woolgar's political analogy is cited to illustrate the quasi-

economic model of science (Knorr-Cetina, ` The Ethnographic Study'', 129^30).41. ` Scienti¢c Communities,'' 116, 129.42. Karin Knorr-Cetina, ` Introduction: The micro-sociological challenge of macro-

sociology: towards a reconstruction of social theory and methodology,'' in Knorr-Cetina and A.V. Cicourel, editors, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology(Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 36^37. In their pre¢x to Bourdieu'scontribution, the editors take the latter's argument as demonstrating the centralityof power as ` springing from the actions and reactions of agents who have no choicebut to struggle to maintain their position of speci¢c capital in a social ¢eld.''Although they overtly sympathize with Bourdieu's attempt to escape from thedilemma of individualism vs. collectivism, they also remain aware that, in compar-ison with the other contributions, the problem is located ``most exclusively on amacrolevel'' (ibid., 304).

43. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 197^98, 213, 237^239, 258^259.44. Callon and Latour, ` Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,'' in Knorr-Cetina and Cicour-

el, editors, 1981, 293. Implicit criticisms of Bourdieu's sociology are scattered overfootnotes 11 and 20.

45. Bruno Latour, ` Give Me a Laboratory,'' 157^158. ` It is a political process. It is not apolitical process. It is since (scientists) gain a source of power. It is not since it is asource of fresh power that escapes the routine and easy de¢nition of a statedpolitical power. . . . Pasteur, representing the microbes and displacing everyoneelse, is making politics, but by other, unpredictable means that force everyone elseout, including the traditional political forces'' (ibid., 167^168).

46. Michel Callon, ``Some elements of a sociology of translation,'' in John Law, editor,Power, Action, and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge,1986), 196; Michel Callon, John Law, and Arie Rip, editors,Mapping the Dynamicsof Science (London & Houndmills, MacMillan, 1986), 4, 222; John Law, `Èditor'sIntroduction: Power/Knowledge and the Dissolution of the Sociology of Knowl-edge,'' in idem, editor, 1986. ` In employing a Nietzschean worldview, actor-networktheory simultaneously secures the universal applicability of its political metaphorics,


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and stretches the notion of relational power, expressed in terms like will andforce, to cover everything'' (Nick Lee and Steve Brown, ` Otherness and the ActorNetwork: The Undiscovered Continent,''American Behavioral Scientist 37/6 (1994),778).

47. Bruno Latour, ` Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,''Knowledge and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed.Robert Alun Jones and Henrika Kuklick (Greenwood: JAI Press, 1986), 32.

48. Here Latour echoes Foucault's familiar argument that power is ` not that whichmakes the di¡erence between those who exclusively possess and retain it, and thosewho do not have it and submit to it. Power must be analyzed as something whichcirculates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It isnever localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as acommodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-likeorganisation'' (Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98). Foucault duly criticizesboth the juridical-liberal and the Marxist conceptualizations of power as ` econo-mist'' and favors their replacement by a ` non-economic analysis of power'' (ibid.,88^89).

49. Bruno Latour, ``The powers of association,'' in Law, editor, 1986, 274.50. Latour, ` The powers of association,'' 279n, 297n, 276^278. Echoes of this radical

urge for conceptual innovation are also heard in Latour's Science in Action, wherehe pleads the necessity to get rid of a queue of traditional categories such as power,knowledge, pro¢t, and capital, ` because they divide up a cloth that we want seam-less in order to study it as we choose'' (Bruno Latour, Science in Action (MiltonKeyness: The Open University Press, 1987): 223). Meanwhile, the vocabulary ofpolitics (spokespersons, making allies, representation, delegation, parliament ofthings) remains dominant throughout. Cf. also Latour, ` The Politics of Explana-tion,'' in S.Woolgar, editor, Knowledge and Re£exivity (London: Sage, 1988): 155^176, and idem, ` Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: Sociology of a Door-Closer,'' Social Problems 35 (1988): 298^310), which extends the notion of repre-sentative delegation from people to things, so that things may also ` stand'' or ` act''for people.

51. Latour, ` The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy,'' Science, Technol-ogy, and HumanValues 16/1 (1991): 3^19; idem,WeHave Never BeenModern. Onceagain, Latour provides explicit references to Foucault (` The Impact of ScienceStudies,'' 13, 15).

52. Cf. my review ``HaveWe Never Been Modern? Towards a Demontage of Labour'sModern Constitution,''History of the Human Sciences 8/3 (1995): 129^141.

53. This is not to suggest that Mannheim consciously anticipated dilemmas that onlysubsequently became more fully articulated. I do argue, however, that there is anunfortunate break in intellectual lineage between Mannheim's sociology of knowl-edge on the one hand, and both Bourdieu's ¢eld theory of science and constructivistscience studies on the other, which, if mended, could restore the capital-powerpolarization to its a broader historical frame and promote critical distanciationfrom it. See Pels, ` Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scienti¢c Knowledge.''

54. This also critically bears upon Arlie Hochchild's view of Bourdieu's `èconomizing''metaphor, ` which turns culture into something we have or we don't have ^ liketable manners, the art of conversation and self-con¢dence''; she rather prefers theterm ` culture'' ` to refer to a set of practices and beliefs which, consciously or not,we deploy. But I also believe that we partly are what we deploy'' (Arlie RussellHochchild, ` The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the Abduction of Femi-


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nism: Signs from Women's Advice Books,'' Theory, Culture, and Society 11/2(1994), 20n).

55. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Di¡erence (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990): 27, 31, 34.

56. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegri¡ und Funktionsbegri¡ (Berlin: S. Cassirer, 1910);Georg Simmel,The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990 [1907]); Mann-heim, Essays, 84¡; Norbert Elias,What is Sociology? (London: Hutchinson, 1978);Foucault, Power/Knowledge ; Pierre Bourdieu and Lo|« c J. D. Wacquant, Invitationto a Re£exive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

57. Pierre Bourdieu, ``The Forms of Capital,'' 243¡.58. Barry Barnes,The Nature of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988): 48, 53, 57^62.59. John Law, ` Power, discretion, and strategy,'' in idem, editor,ASociology ofMonsters:

Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination (London & New York: Routledge,1991), 166^168, 174.

60. Cf. Elias,What is Sociology?, 80; Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 88^89, 98.61. Latour, ` The powers of association,'' 267.62. Unfortunately, I cannot enter upon a discussion of the radical idea pro¡ered by

actor-network theory that society (and power) are crucially stabilized by bringingin non-human resources. This I consider helpful only if the de¢nition of nonhumansor technological artifacts is broad enough to include rei¢ed social institutions androles, which are pre-re£exively embodied in human actors ^ which appears to strainthe issue. Law's approach appears more ecumenical here than Latour's, both in thetheory of power and in the theory of ` social matter.'' I presume it is not coinciden-tal that, when ¢lling in his notion that social relations are ` embodied in a range ofmaterials,'' Law's materials explicitly include ` bodies'' next to texts, technicalartifacts, and natural things (` Power, discretion, and strategy,'' 174).

63. Pels,Macht of eigendom?, 184¡.


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Documents

Mixing metaphors: Politics or economics of knowledge?