Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 31

We have argued above that the main attraction of controversies is their ability to break open black boxes that would otherwise remain sealed. But opening up what is taken for granted requires work (at least as much as was invested in its black boxing) that actors are very unlikely to undertake unless forced to by the situation. Controversies serve as forges where, as Sarah Whatmore puts it, “the things on which we rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of our everyday lives become molten and make their agential force felt” (Whatmore, 2009, pp. 588–9). Just like real forges, however, they only work if they are hot enough to unsettle existing arrangements and push actors to contest them explicitly. Callon’s definition of a “cold situation” provides a counterexample:

In “cold” situations, on the other hand, agreement regarding ongoing overflows is swiftly achieved. Actors are identified, interests are stabilized, preferences can be expressed, responsibilities are acknowledged and accepted. The possible world states are already known or easy to identify: calculated decisions can be taken. The sudden (but nevertheless foreseeable because already experienced) pollution of a watercourse by a chemical factory falls into this category: sensors are already calibrated, analytical procedures are codified; the protagonists already know how to calculate their costs and benefits and are ready to negotiate (if necessary on the basis of clearly formulated insurance contracts) in order to determine the level of compensation payable. (Callon, 1998, p. 261)

In practice, this often translates into prioritizing issues that are hot at the moment the mapping takes place. It is not impossible to study past disputes by drawing on archives and documents, but it is generally more difficult both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, because once an issue is closed it is difficult to resist the temptation to “naturalize” its outcome and believe that the dispute could not have played out differently. Practically, because the actors will be less willing to offer their testimonies: those who “won” the conflict will present the conclusion as unavoidable; those who lost may prefer to forget about it. The black boxes are closed and few people are motivated to reopen them. Cartographers, in this situation, cannot just “follow” or “monitor” their objects, but are forced to “excavate” and “reconstruct” them.

The same is true, a fortiori, for upcoming issues: everyone expects some new product to revolutionize the market; some new law to wreak havoc once adopted by parliament; some new technology to incur moral objections when developed. Yet, until this actually happens there is little for the controversy mapper to do. The temperature only rises when actors become “sufficiently affected by what is at issue” (Whatmore & Landström, 2011, p. 583).