Comparisons as imperium brings with it the active modern subject (who imposes the comparison), and the passive modern object (who is compared). Such a subject strives to know the world through describing the properties of objects (as objects having properties is the comparison imposed), with the hope of determining modern facts – at which point what objects are and our knowledge of them are one and the same and the comparison is made invisible. The two alternatives to comparison I offer here, begin with transforming the subject/object duality. In doing so they are both concerned with how human and non-humans can live together, without being thrown apart as two entirely separate categories of things (subjects and objects). First, there are participant-comparisons (continually being developed below). Second, there is abstentions (written about in part 4).
Participant comparison makes room for non-human entities to be more active in the achievement of our collective world. We could begin with Latour’s paper ‘Do scientific objects have a history? Pasteur and Whitehead in a bath of lactic acid.’ Here Latour describes how a new entity comes to join the world: lactic yeast. As he states in his title he is accompanied by Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Pasteur and a bath of lactic acid. And together they are an event for lactic yeast. The paper is a collective effort to give a credible account of lactic yeast. In doing so both narrators are trying to keep the terms by which the account is given included in the account itself. We read Pasteur explaining very carefully the apparatus and his gestures, his movements and measurements. Everything added and everything taken away needs to be described:
And Latour does the same, painstaking taking us through his movements and apparatus, namely Whiteheads metaphysics of the event.
Most importantly, Latour’s account resist’s two additives which most often sneak into accounts of innovation, novelty or emergence. First, there is the addition on the side of humans – granting them a rationality that was not present before, or granting some humans a rationality not shared by others. Second, there is adding to the grey blobs of yeast stuck to a vessel the status of an always existing object, and in turn giving the chemical reactions previous known the status of an always non-existent mistake. Both these make the feat incredible in that they rely on a difference made outside the situation (a difference in rationality between peoples, or a difference in the status of objects).
When these two metaphysical additives are resisted however, the possibility of difference cannot be limited nor reduced to the entity yeast alone. What makes the difference is the event, and this makes possible both cooperation and recalcitrance. Recalcitrance is the most important feature of Stengers’ participant comparison. According to William Paulson, ‘What matters [for Stengers] is that the knowledge and assumptions of the knower be put at risk: that whatever the knower is interacting with have the power to make a difference in the process.’ (112) As Latour listens to Pasteur, he hears someone carefully following material things, and someone prepared to consider the world very differently though the practice of this following. This difference is also material: the emergence of lactic yeast.
