2.2 BASES TEÓRICO – CIENTÍFICAS
2.2.10 Factores determinantes para la Satisfacción Laboral
dimensions in practice, they have always been explicit about each of them, but they have never been explicit about the relation between the two sets of practices. Nonmoderns have to stress the relations beteen them if they are to understand both the moderns' successes and their recent failures, and still not lapse into postmodernism. By deploying both dimensions at once, we may be able to accommodate the hybrids and give them a place, a name, a home, a philosophy, an ontology and, I
hope, a new constitution.
3.2 What Is a Quasi-Object?
Using the two dimensions at once, the longitude and the latitude, we may now be able to locate the position of these strange new hybrids and to understand how come that we had to wait for science studies in order to define what, following Michel Serres ( 1 987), I shall call quasi-objects, quasi-subjects. To do so, we simply have to follow the little comic strip in Figure 3.2.
Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system 'naturalization' (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things. Fortunately, social scientists know better and they show that
5 The double denunciation Denunciation no. 1 , --
--
-- .... ... .... .... ... _____, Belief no. 1 Belief no.2 , ---
--- .... , .... .... ... ___ ... .,. Denunciation no.2 , ---
--
.... ... .... .... ... _____, DialecticDualism and its destruction
Nature no. I Society no.l
'soh'
e-��---��,
'hard'Narure no.2
'� � �ety
no.2'hard' - - - 'soft'
Nature no. I ,_ _ _ _ _ _ Society no. l
'soft' .... .... 'hard'
Nature no.2 ' .... ... no.2
'hard' - - - 'soft'
4
Nature Quasi-object
Society
The locus of the quasi-object
6 Figure 3.2 What is a quasi-object?
the arrow goes in fact in the other direction, from society to the objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests. At least since Emile Durkheim, such has been the price of entry into the sociology profession (Durkheim, [19 15] 1 965). To become a social scientist is to realize that the inner properties of objects do not count, that they are mere receptacles for human categories.
The difficulty, however, is to reconcile this form of denunciation with another one in which the directions of the arrows are exactly reversed. Ordinary people, mere social actors, average citizens, believe that they are free and that they can modify their desires, their motives and their rational strategies at will. The arrow of their beliefs now goes from the Subject/Society pole to the Nature pole. But fortunately, social scientists
WHAT IS A QUASI-OBJECT? 53
are standing guard, and they denounce, and debunk and ridicule this naive belief in the freedom of the human subject and society. This time they use the nature of things - that is the indisputable results of the sciences - to show how it determines, informs and moulds the soft and pliable wills of the poor humans. 'Naturalization' is no longer a bad word but the shibboleth that allows the social scientists to ally themselves with the natural sciences. All the sciences (natural and social) are now mobilized to tum the humans into so many puppets manipulated by objective forces - which only the natural or social scientists happen to know.
When the two critical resources are put together we now understand why it is so difficult for social scientists to reach agreement on objects. They too 'see double'. In the first denunciation, objects count for nothing; they are just there to be used as the white screen on to which society projects its cinema. But in the second, they are so powerful that they shape the human society, while the social construction of the sciences that have produced them remains invisible. Objects, things, consumer goods, works of art are either too weak or too strong. But still stranger are the successive roles given to society. In the first denunciation, society is so powerful that it is sui generis, it has no more cause than the transcendental ego it replaces. It is so originary that it is able to mould and shape what is nothing more than an arbitrary and shapeless matter. In the second form of denunciation, however, it has become powerless, shaped in turn by the powerful objective forces that completely determine its action. Society is either too powerful or too weak
vis-a-vis
objects which are alternatively too powerful or too arbitrary.The solution to this double contradictory denunciation is so pervasive that it has been providing social scientists with most of their common sense; it is called dualism. The Nature pole will be partitioned into two sets: the first list will incude its 'softer' parts - screens for projecting social categories - while the second list will include all its 'harder' parts - causes for determining the fate of human categories: that is, the sciences and the technologies. The same partition will be made on the Subject/ Society pole: there will be its 'harder' components - the sui generis social factors - and its 'softer' components - determined by the forces discovered by sciences and technologies. Social scientists will happily alternate from one to the other showing without any trouble that for instance gods are mere idols shaped by the requirements of social order, while the rules of society are determined by biology.
To be sure, this alternation is not very convincing. First, the lists are made haphazardly, the 'soft' list of the nature pole gathering all the things social scientists happen to despise - religion, consumption, popular culture and politics - while the 'hard' list is made of all the sciences they naively believe in at the time - economics, genetics, biology,
linguistics, or brain sciences. Second, it is not clear why society needs to be projected on to arbitrary objects if those objects count for nothing. Is society so weak that it needs continuous resuscitation ? So terrible that, like Medusa's face, it should be seen only in a mirror? And if religion, arts or styles are necessary to 'reflect', 'reify', 'materialize', 'embody' society - to use some of the social theorists' favourite verbs - then are objects not, in the end, its co-producers? Is not society built literally - not metaphorically - of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles? But then where is the illusion of the 'common' actor in the bottom arrow of Figure 3.2. 1 ? Maybe social scientists have simply forgotten that before projecting itself on to things society has to be made, built, constructed? And out of what material could it be built if not out of nonsocial, non human resources? But social theory is forbidden to draw this conclusion because it has no conception of objects except the one handed down to it by the alternative 'hard' sciences which are so strong that they simply determine social order which in turn becomes flimsy and immaterial.
Dualism may be a poor solution, but it provided 99 per cent of the social sciences' critical repertoire, and nothing would have disturbed its blissful asymmetry if science studies had not upset the applecart. Up to that point, dualism had seemed to work, since the 'hard' part of society was used on the 'soft' objects, while the 'hard' objects were used only on the 'soft' part of society (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Social scientists could denounce the practices they did not believe in by using the solid science of society they had concocted and embracing the sciences they had complete confidence in so as to establish the social order. It is the glory of the Edinburgh school of social studies of science to have attempted a forbidden crossover (Barnes, 1 974; Barnes and Shapin, 1 979; Bloor, [1 976] 1 99 1 ; MacKenzie, 198 1 ; Shapin, 1992). They used the critical repertoire that was reserved for the 'soft' parts of nature to debunk the 'harder' parts, the sciences themselves! In short, they wanted to do for science what Durkheim had done for religion, or Bourdieu for fashion and taste; and they innocently thought that the social sciences would remain unchanged, swallowing science as easily as religion or the arts. But there was a big difference, invisible until then. Social scientists did not really believe in religion and popular consumption. They did believe in science, however, from the bottom of their scientistic hearts.
Thus this breach of the dualists' game immediately bankrupted the whole enterprise. What had started as a 'social' study of science could not succeed, of course, and this is why it lasted only a split second - just long enough to reveal the terrible flaws of dualism. By treating the 'harder' parts of nature in the same way as the softer ones - that is, as arbitrary constructions determined by the interests and requirements of a
PHILOSOPHIES . . . OVER THE YAWNING GAP 55