331 Anais do XXI Seminário Internacional Nanotecnologias, Sociedade e Meio Ambiente desafios jurídicos éticos e sociais para a “grande transição sustentável” (XXI SEMINANOSOMA) and computer” (Callon 1986). Callon therefore claims that, depending on the point of observation taken in the attribution process, the net- work can be seen as an actor or as an intermediary. In short, translation processes involve producing displacements and definitions with different degrees of possibility to become stabilised, and where it is not possible to differentiate between the de- vices and networks containing them, between actors and network-assemblage. It is in this discursive logic where, as noted at the beginning of this section, the postulate is inscribed, which refers to the impossi- bility of differentiating science ontically from a context understood as social – which substantivizes what is “social”. And, consequently, the very idea of “impact” must be resignified. A more concrete example of this approach can be found in the analysis of the relationship between Pasteur and his laboratory work on viruses, whereby Latour explicitly discusses the inside and outside of science, and also produces a definition of politics that differs from that developed by the traditional sociology of science. He argues that we are never confronted with a social context on the one hand and a science, laboratory or individual scientist on the other. There is no context that is influencing, or not influencing, a laboratory immune to social forces. This image, which is the dominant image among soci- ologists, is precisely what is untenable. Pasteur, according to Latour, actively modifies the society of his time and does so directly (not indi- rectly) by displacing some of the most important actors. (Latour 1988) Latour is critical and argues that the sociology of science’s insistence on treating politics and interests as motives “external” to sci- ence is a “congenital weakness”.16 Rather, his position is that Pasteur (for example) should be understood as a thoroughly political man, if being a spokesman for forces with which to shape society is meant by this, while being the only reliable and legitimate authority for such forces. In the same line of reasoning, neither does Latour accept the theoretical operation of historians and sociologists when defining scales and analysis levels to differentiate between the macro-level of French society and micro-level of the microbiology laboratory, arguing that the latter helps to redefine and displace the former. Moreover, he considers that the sociology of science cripples itself from the outset if it assumes that there is a difference in levels or scale between “social 16 The explanation developed from the ANT perspective on translation and assemblage pro- cesses is fundamentally opposed to the possibility of “invoking” explanatory elements ex- ternal to these processes.
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