en fr

HAL Id: hal-01509936

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01509936

Submitted on 18 Apr 2017

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

To cite this version:

Maud Devès. The Question of the Real: From Science to Catastrophe. Recherches en psychanalyse, Université Paris 7- Denis Diderot, 2015, Traumas ; Passages à l’acte ; Cliniques contemporaines / Trauma; Acting; Contemporary clinical explorations, 2 (20 ), pp.107-116. �hal-01509936�

From Science to Catastrophe

Maud H. Devès

Association Recherches en psychanalyse | « Recherches en psychanalyse » 2015/2 n° 20 | pages 107a à 116a

ISSN 1767-5448

Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse :

---http://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-en-psychanalyse-2015-2-page-107a.htm

---Pour citer cet article :

---Maud H. Devès, « The Question of the Real. From Science to Catastrophe », Recherches en psychanalyse 2015/2 (n° 20), p. 107a-116a.

---Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Recherches en psychanalyse. © Association Recherches en psychanalyse. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

The Question of the Real

From Science to Catastrophe

La question du réel

De la science à la catastrophe

Maud H. Devès

Abstract:

This article draws upon the teachings of psychoanalysis in order to explore the place that “scientists” can, and cannot, hold in the face of the demands that are made of them. It explores the transference that is operative towards Science through figures of the monster and the Catastrophe. Since situations of catastrophe confront the individual and the collective with the question of the real, with the way this real is put into discourse and into a narrative, they allow us to underline the potentially traumatogenic character of the scientific project. This observation invites us to distinguish between the practice of research and the situation of the expert assessment.

Résumé:

Cet article tire profit des enseignements de la psychanalyse pour explorer la place que les « scientifiques » peuvent, et ne peuvent pas, tenir face aux demandes qui leur sont adressées. Il explore le transfert qui s’opère envers la Science au travers des figures du monstre et de la Catastrophe. Parce qu’elles confrontent l’individu et le collectif à la question du réel, de sa mise en discours et en récit, les situations de catastrophes permettent de souligner le caractère potentiellement traumatogène du projet scientifique, constat qui invite à distinguer la pratique de la recherche et la situation d’expertise.

Keywords:

Mots-clefs:

discours, récit

Plan:

I - Introduction

II - The Anxiety Provoking Character of the Scientific Project III - The Necessity of an Epistemological Return

IV - What Catastrophes Teach Us

V - The Sciences Faced with Catastrophe

20│2015/2

[Online] Dec. 30, 2015

I - Introduction

The scientific project has led to the development of technologies whose secondary effects are not very well known, and which are therefore poorly mastered, thus generating new risks. Whether a source of threat or an instrument of protection, Science is omnipresent in the risk society (Beck, 2001) and researchers are being solicited with ever-greater frequency to intervene as experts (Roqueplo, 1997). Confronted with these postures of systematic skepticism or blind belief, they nonetheless vouch for a growing reticence to take a position on the public stage (Klein, 2010).

This article aims to isolate some indicators for reflection with regard to the place that “scientific researchers” can and cannot hold faced with the requests that are addressed to them. We are obliged to note, in effect, that at a time that only puts its trust in what has been “scientifically proven”, the way in which knowledges and scientific know-how are being developed remains enigmatic for the greater number of our co-citizens (Girel, 2013). The researchers themselves only rarely take hold of the epistemological tools that would allow them to think through the inscription of their practice in the life of the city state. In these conditions, one can hardly be surprised that the link between the scientific and the political is a locus of all manner of fantasies and all manner of polemics (Hall, 2011). The context of crises that are associated with catastrophes is particularly favorable to the study of the transference that is operative towards Science, because it confronts the individual and the collective with the experience of a failing of meaning and invites one to form a narrative. The study of the modalities of this transference allows for a space to be reopened in which the subjectivity of the scientist at work can be thought about. In this article, we will take advantage of lessons from psychoanalysis in order to propose an epistemology articulated around notions of the real, discourse and narrative. This work will lead us to underline the traumatogenic character of the fragmentation of scientific discourses and to question the

difference between the practice of research and the situation of expert assessment.

II - The Anxiety Provoking Character of

the Scientific Project

At the end of the nineteenth century, Claude Bernard was writing that “science is impersonal in the sense that the facts that are discovered are not inventions; they are natural realities” (Bernard, 1878, p. 259). Since then the evolution in knowledge has led to the emergence of realities that it is difficult to account for by pitting that which would belong to Humankind against that which would belong to Nature (Latour, 1991). Genetically modified organisms, for example, are not exactly human, but nor are they altogether natural. Very early on, some were envisaging the anxiety-provoking character of this “hybridity”. In

Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818),

Mary Shelley poses the question as to the extent to which the scientifically created entity can be recognized and taken charge of by the human community. The plot depicts a scientist who manages to give life to a creature that he has put together from scratch, but who, horrified by the monstrosity of his creation, prefers to take flight rather than confront it. The creature will keep returning in a persecutory manner to take his revenge. The novelist suggests that the sacrifice of one man, even if he is the scientist at the origin of the creation of the monster, might not be enough to resolve the problem posed by this new order of reality.

The figure of the monster is interesting because it allows us to see the paradoxical impact of the scientific project upon our relationship with the sacred and, through this, to the political. Whether an object of horror or fascination, monstrosity (physical deformity) has long been considered as possessing a divine origin (Martin, 1880). The scientific project empties monstrosity of its sacred dimension. In the course of the nineteenth century, “the monster is naturalized, the irregular is brought back to the rule and the prodigy to predictability. It then goes without saying that the scientific spirit would find it

monstrous that man could have once believed in so many monstrous animals” (Canguilhem, 1992 / 2008). But if the implementation of the scientific project leads to the material world to be emptied of its sacred dimension, the sacred itself does not disappear. It simply finds a way to be incarnated in other forms, and the monstrous emerges precisely where one was not expecting it. By leading to the realization of a multitude of entities that are difficult to classify in the usual categories, some of which have, moreover, already found the occasion to reveal themselves as dangerous, the scientific project has been contributing to the proliferation of monstrous figures, which are effectively present around us today (Manuel, 2009).1 This is what Hannah Arendt (1961) was condemning when she declared that it might even be the case that we “will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do” (p. 3).

But if we have learnt to mistrust the confirmed monstrosity of certain technological advances, we have perhaps not yet taken full measure of the depth of the political upheaval generated by the scientific project (Debray, 2006). For the

scientifically created entity is not only

technological. “The climate”, for example, has eluded the strictly academic field of knowledge of the world, to become a public entity. Today, it is becoming more substantial, in a polymorphous manner, in various fields of society (Devès, 2015). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has presented the climatic “anomaly” to us as a monstrosity created by human activities that threaten to make a return in a persecutory form and, faced with this contemporary Frankenstein’s monster, the experts have been inviting us to make a critical return to our relationship with the political from the angle of a certain re-sacralization of the environment.

III - The Necessity of an Epistemological

Return

It is difficult to grasp the exact nature of the upheavals that have been produced by the

scientific project, but it is possible to rationalize the scope of these upheavals. With this in mind, it is interesting to introduce the notion of the real that is familiar to us from psychoanalysis. Freud ended his “Outline of Psychoanalysis” by comparing the Natural Sciences to his “depth psychology”:

In our science as in the others the problem is the same: behind the attributes (qualities) of the object under examination which are presented directly to our perception, we have to discover something else which is more independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves. But herein lies the very nature and limitation of our science (Freud, 1964, p. 196).

While the term “natural reality” did not allow us to include the genetically modified organisms, they undeniably form part of the “real state of affairs” which we shall name, quite simply, real. One single state of affairs can give rise to different discourses. If several different people are asked to draw a volcano, no drawing will be identical to another. The very definition of what a volcano is varies from one dictionary to another. For the Larousse, it is a matter of a “relief, in general in a conical shape, formed by the magmatic products that reach the surface of the planet, whether on open land or under water.” For the CNRTL, it is “a natural orifice through which a reservoir of magma of high temperature, which stems from a deep point of origin, communicates with the surface of the Earth and spreads out”, or else an “opening through which boiling matter escapes.” Each of these definitions tends to account for one single “real,” but the different formulations make

different realities emerge. The second

definition, by specifying the locus of the origin of the magma and linking it to a condition of

high temperature, restricts the field of represen-tations opened by the first definition. The third definition, on the contrary, opens it up and allows, for example, for a representation of a mud volcano.

One can propose that what is at stake in the scientific approach is to go beyond these points of discursive incoherence. This beyond can only come about if two conditions are met. First, it has to be supposed that these different discourses bear on one single real. Then, it has to be supposed that it is possible to approach the real right up close. These are the postulates that Freud makes when he writes that, “the yield brought to light by scientific work from our primary sense perceptions will consist in an insight into connections and dependent relations which are present in the external world” (ibid.). He nonetheless insists on the fact that it is illusory to hope to reach the real, “since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves” (ibid).

The scientific approach would not, therefore, consist so much in decoding the real as in

encoding it by capturing it in the nets of

discourse; the events that have been perceived or measured are only organized into relations of correlation and dependence in and by discourse.2 The specificity of the scientific enterprise would be due, then, to the adoption of a method that would allow for the elaboration of discourses that are tailored until they stand right up close to the real state of affairs. A discourse will be a much better “fit” when it allows for a purchase on this state of affairs that is sufficiently precise and reproducible for us to learn to make do with it. This metaphor can help us to represent the epistemological points of impact of this proposal. Let us imagine that the scientist is a tailor of bespoke suits, and that he is trying to make a suit for something that is invisible. This “something” would only be fleshed out in the process of the appointment with the tailor. The

tailor refines his work several times over, and approaches the invisible from different sides. He makes a sketch, goes back to another sketch, until he is able to grasp the contours of this invisible that he is striving to circumscribe. The scientific discourse acts like a suit on the real. When it fits well, it allows us to grasp the ungraspable and to learn how to make do with

it. Let us take an example. If the thermometer

indicates that it is 0° C outside, I would take a coat before going out. Yet the thermometer is only giving one representation of the real among many others. The ciphered value that it indicates only has a meaning in the discourse in which it is taken up. What would a temperature of 750° C inspire in you? It might be difficult to find a meaning for it when one takes as one’s only basis our day-to-day experience. For the volcanologist, this is the temperature of magma. Being acquainted with the association between temperature and composition, the volcanologist can deduce from this a high silica content. The thermometer and the temperature are like the thread with which to sew a tailor’s suit. They serve as a tool from which to concoct a discourse / suit that is a good fit for the real state of affairs. The same tool can serve to tailor different discourses. Different tools can serve to tailor one self same discourse. A discourse is effective if it allows one to have an effect on the real and to protect oneself from its effects.3 Different dynamics contribute to the develop-ment of scientific discourses. The researcher has an experience of the real that he is trying to circumscribe that is necessarily a singular experience. In the first place because of his individual singularity, but also because one experimental situation is never identical with any other experimental situation. The sizeable work of tailoring [le travail de taille] that he or she brings about is thus limited by a constant confrontation with singularities. The researcher is also limited by tools that he or sh has at his or her disposal, because a suit is only ever cut in the weft of fabrics that already exist. In terms of method, the researcher proceeds by approaching the real

through pieces. This mode of operating leads to

the emergence of discourses that are more and more specialized, and which allow the singula-rities to be approached right up close. Nonetheless, something always escapes this, even in the discourse that provides the best fit. It is sometimes possible to appreciate the part of the real that a discourse has not managed to capture in its nets in quantitative terms. This is what physicians call incertitude. The incertitude is much weaker when the question that is being posed is specific – that is to say, adapted to the real manifestations such as they are perceived and measured, but also adapted to the state of the different forms of knowledge and know-how that are already in circulation in the scientific community. In effect, scientific discourses are developed in a collective way and thus are also subject to forms of knowledge and know-how on the basis of which they have been articulated. Different discourses can also be valid, to the extent that they circumscribe different “pieces” of the real, but in general one discourse is considered to be better than another if it allows one to make do with a larger piece of the real. This pushes towards a universalization of the scientific discourses and counterbalances the effects that are linked to specialization. Nevertheless, no discourse can account for the real state of affairs in its totality. In actual fact, the scientific approach makes a multitude of discourses emerge that cannot on the face of it be reconciled, but which act like a host of suits that allow the invisible to be grasped through fragments.

Claude Bernard supposed that the sciences were impersonal because they dealt with natural realities. The introduction of the notion of the real allows things to be formulated differently. The scientific discourses are impersonal in the sense that they are

a-subjective. A discourse allows one to make do with it all the better given that it does not

depend on the one who utters it. The objectivity of the scientific project is not so much due, therefore, to the possibility of pitting “human reality” against “natural reality”, as to the dynamic of the project implemented by the

collective of researchers. It is the permanent tension between the different movements that we have described (real specialization / singularity vs. universalization / inscription by and in existing discourses, in and by the collective) that allows for the emergence of a specific form of objectivity. And this specific form of objectivity has proven its efficacy because the elaboration of the scientific discourses that provide and ever-tighter fit on the real has allowed for the realization of unprecedented technical prowess. Observing the plural and impersonal character of the scientific discourses leads nonetheless to a difficulty of considerable size because, without a subject to assume the enunciation, how can one think about the responsibility of scientists in relation to the project in which the subject participates? At the very moment Frankenstein brings about the monstrosity of the creature that he has just generated, he designates it as a catastrophe. The slide that Shelley brings about here, from monster to catastrophe, can be ascertained in the contemporary phantasmagoria. Thus, the nuclear is only said to be “monstrous” because it is accompanied by a threat of catastrophe.

IV - What Catastrophes Teach Us

One often associates catastrophe with the image of devastations caused by natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on. From the point of view of the geophysicist, however, it is possible to take an interest in natural

phenomena that are associated with

catastrophes without having anything to say about the catastrophe itself. The fact is that what is catastrophic is the experience lived by humans, and not the event itself. Thus, the media have spoken very little about the earthquake of 7.9 magnitude that shook Alaska on the 23rd of June 2014, because in the absence of human infrastructures it did not cause any major damage. Nonetheless, it was an earthquake of a magnitude comparable to the one that devastated Lisbon in 1755. Striking a sensitive zone of European maritime commerce,

causing thousands of deaths and immense material damage, it left its mark on people’s minds far beyond the Portuguese borders. Clearly, catastrophes such as this are terrible. However, they are also rare.4 The omnipresence of catastrophe in culture (Critique, 2012) seems to suggest that our appetite for catastrophe is commensurate with our fear of catastrophe: excessive in regard to its factual occurrence. In fact, we maintain an ambivalent relationship with catastrophe. In the Biblical narrative of Noah’s ark, the flood destroys but also allows for the emergence of a fairer world. This ambivalence persists in the plots of contempo-rary films about catastrophe. In The Last Days of

Pompeii (1935) for example, the eruption of

Vesuvius makes the union between a young couple possible, which until then had been prevented by a rival protected by his social position. In 2012 (2009), the heroes manage to embark on new vessels that had been reserved for the rich and the powerful, signaling the possible advent of a new social order.

The figure of the scientist became more and more present in catastrophic fictions during the course of the twentieth century. It was the first to detect the signs of catastrophes to come. All of the plots insist nonetheless on the incapacity of the scientific institution to provide solutions that are adequate for the management of crisis. The hero is a geo-find-all-bricoleur, close to the terrain, who acts on the fringes of the official discourses. Whether political or scientific, these discourses are judged to be incapable of rising to the challenge posed by the unprecedented character of the events. We meet this low confidence again in the returns of experience realized in the wake of “true” crises. In the case of the eruption of La Soufrière in Guadeloupe (1976), when a violent argument broke out among the experts, the population supported the volcanologist “on the ground” and denounced the experts who represented the official institution (DeVanssay, 1979; Beauducel, 2006). The study of past crises allows us to better understand what we expect from Science when faced with catastrophes. The Lisbon disaster

(1755) is particularly interesting from this point of view because it occurred at a time when people were debating the respective places of science and religion. The crisis was a spiritual one as much as a political one. The believers saw in the disaster the expression of divine wrath. For the Catholics, God was punishing the inhabitants of Lisbon for an excess of lust and for their commerce with heretics. For the Protestants, He was punishing the bloody thirsty excesses of the Inquisition, the sumptuous rites and the superstitious veneration of icons. They all supposed, however, that men were, by the intervention of God, collectively culpable and therefore collectively responsible for the disaster. The arbitrariness thus found itself to have been circumscribed, taken up in a logic – admittedly an impenetrable logic, as the ways of God can be – but taken up in a logic all the same, which, at the end of the day, took on a human figure. On the side of the philosophers, Rousseau adopted a position that was very similar to the position that currently prevails, accusing Men of the scale of the devastation: “Admit if you will,” wrote Rousseau, “the Nature in no way gathered there the twenty thousand houses of six or seven floors …” As for Voltaire, he shrugged off the metaphysical question of the why and wherefore by exclaiming in his Poem on

the Lisbon Disaster: “I am like a doctor / Alas I no

nothing.” From the political point of view, people were arguing in order to find out who should be held responsible for the disaster. The Jesuits were accusing the powers that be of weakness. The powers that be accused the Jesuits of stirring up the people’s superstitious fear in order to seize power. Having been expulsed, father Maladriga declared that he had been condemned because he had taken a stand against the “pernicious doctrine that people were trying to spread at the Court and in the city, namely that one should not attribute the earthquake to our sins and to the wrath of a God who was taking revenge on our crimes, but instead to purely physical and natural causes” (Poirier, 2005, p. 124).

In spite of the difference in historical context, the question that were posed at the time of the

Lisbon earthquake were not so different from many of those that are being posed today (Poirier, 2005). It is certainly rarer to invoke divine wrath in our day and age, but it does seem to be the case that we are no more accepting of the arbitrary dimension when we fail to foresee it and to master it. Is it not the case that the proliferation of lawsuits against scientists and / or politicians who are accused of having abused their knowledge and / or their power (see the case of the Aquila earthquake, for example Kerr, 2009 or Alexander, 2013) bear witness to our incapacity to accept the failure of our institutions to give meaning to the hazards that befall us (Devès, 2013)?

It is interesting to establish a parallel between the notions of catastrophe and trauma. Both terms describe a change of state that results from the irruption of a real that outstrips the capacity of the individual and / or of the collective to make do with it. The psychologists who are dispatched to the bedside of victims of catastrophes know this well. In the face of disaster, there is an urgency to reconstruct the sense of a “personal and collective efficacy” (Siles et al., 2011) because the illusion by which the institution can protect the individual from an encounter with non-meaning no longer holds up. For example, Poirier (2005) has reported a case of civil disobedience that occurred the day after the Lisbon earthquake. To the cavalrymen sent by the king to evacuate the town, the people are said to have responded: “We do not have a king any more,” and remained where they were. In the face of death, adherence to the established order would seem to be derisory. The extreme events are, in any case, both particularly traumatogenic and favorable to the invention of new normativities. The restoration of the political seems to have to pass, necessarily, via the restoration of a common relationship with the sacred. Thus, after the attacks that struck Paris a few days ago, as in Lisbon in the eighteenth century, we gathered in the city and we walked so as to re-appropriate for ourselves the space that had been transfigured by the sudden upsurge of an

unsayable real. To inscribe individual bodies in one large single collective appears to be the only thing capable of restoring the sense of a sacred union in the face of the brutality of death.

V - The Sciences Faced with Catastrophe

technological, catastrophes designate an

irreversible transformation of the state of things that Humankind knows neither how to predict nor how to master, and which calls into question its capacity to make do with it. This upheaval is monstrous in the sense that Frankenstein’s monster is monstrous. It is impossible to account for this in the framework of ordinary discourses. After the Lisbon earthquake, the journalist Pedegache wrote that he did not have “colors strong enough to paint the disaster.” He observed that his narrative could “never [come close] to the truth.” The catastrophic experience confronted everyone with a failing of meaning. Then, what was at stake was to bring about a narrative in which the individual would be able to situate himself as being something other than a heap of flesh and blood that has to undergo randomness. This narration can operate in different ways. Lisbon’s believers were able to suppose that they were at the origin of the disaster because they had sinned. Thus they became the authors of the catastrophe. When we suppose that anthropic emissions are at the origin of a climatic anomaly, we suppose ourselves to be the

authors of this monstrosity that overwhelms us.

Literature, cinema and art are a host of different forms of narration.

The question arises as to what could or should be the role of the sciences and the scientists in the elaboration of the collective narratives. It is not by chance that we have thus far spoken of scientific discourses and not narratives. Hannah Arendt said that:

[…] the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character

of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence” (Arendt, 1958 / 1998, p. 324).

The scientific project leads to the production of a multitude of a-subjective discourses that allow one to make do with scattered pieces of the real. The very dynamic of the scientific project renders difficult the emergence of an encompassing narrative that would situate the individual in a relationship of morality or of subjective truth in regard to the hazards that he or she undergoes.5 This dynamic might even have a traumatogenic character. To return to the metaphor of the tailor of the suit, the sciences only catch hold of the invisible to the extent that it enters the wardrobe or discourses that they produce. The more specialized the cut of this wardrobe is, the more it becomes evident that there is a shortage of discourses that are adapted to the unprecedented situations. So long as the citizen supposes that Science is in a position to protect him or her from an encounter with non-meaning, and not merely in a position to furnish him or her with the discourses to make

do with scattered pieces of the real, the citizen

will be exposed to the observation, a particularly destabilizing observation, of the weakness of the scientific institution when it comes to accounting for his or her subjective experience. From this point of view, the use that consists of amalgamating the multiplicity of scientific practices under one signifier with an astonishing effect – Science – is particularly harmful.

Asking oneself about the way in which the sciences can be convoked in situations of crisis necessitates, in my opinion, that two things be brought about. The first thing is that the position of the scientist who is solicited to react in the face of a catastrophe (whether the catastrophe is expected, has already happened, or is still in course, and whether it is natural or technological) is not the position of the researcher, but the position of the expert. The second thing is that in passing from research

project to expert assessment, something is operative that is nothing less than the order of the narration. Roqueplo (1997) considers an expert to be any person or institution that agrees to respond to a demand for information to someone who considers him or her to be competent. The specificity of the situation of the expert assessment with regard to the work of the researcher is that it requires that the existing discourses be frozen into a whole that is ordered in such a way that it allows for a decision to be made. For that, the expert begins by “tailoring” the demand that is addressed to him or her into a series of “things” that can be apprehended in the state of scientific knowledges and modes of know-how that are available. Even if the expert tries to account for uncertainties and controversies, the narrative that he or she proposes results from a certain number of choices. In order to turn again to the metaphor of the tailor of the suit, one may consider that in the case of the expert assessment, the outline of the thing to be circumscribed is imposed by the request from the fiduciary. It nevertheless remains possible to make suits that are very different, from existing pieces of fabric. On the face of it, there is no reason to contrast the world of research with the world of expert assessment, but it does have to be understood that the work to be furnished in the situation of an expert assessment is different from the work to which a researcher is accustomed. The researcher circumscribes the real in response to solicitations that are internal to the scientific field, and which are often internal to his or her field of specialty. In so doing, the researcher participates in the production and the objectification of a plurality of a-subjective discourses and does not master the finality of what is thus produced. The work of the expert has, on the contrary, an inevitably political finality to the extent that it aims to respond to a precise request. The “scientist” who is in the position of an expert assessor is all the more responsible for the speech that he or she addresses to his or her interlocutor given that the latter is probably not in a position to

circumscribe the full scope of his or her request. Lastly, we should underline that there is a great temptation to envisage the catastrophe as the consequence of a causal event that is well determined. This idea leads people to think that it would enough to adopt a plan in three stages to avoid any future catastrophe: 1. To identify the potentially dangerous phenomena; 2. To learn to recognize their manifestations and their effects; And 3. to invent solutions to restrict their dangerousness and reduce their impact on our societies. One can find these three major steps in most of the agendas for the management of risks. The experts are not dupes, however. The catastrophe takes root in preexisting

vulnera-bilities and is fed by latent conflicts (Lovell, 2013). It is not the end of a chain of calculable events. The illusion that it would be such an end is a harmful one because it allows it to be supposed that, from the cause to the consequences, it would be enough to run the gamut of the specter of the sciences from the physical and chemical sciences though to the psychological, social, economic, and political sciences to be in a position to master what cannot be mastered (Gulliver et al., 2014; Doherty and Clayton, 2011). The fantasy of an all-powerful Science does not resist the confrontation with the catastrophic event. It seems to us that it is this failing that the catastrophe fictions have been staging.

Bibliography:

Alexander, D. E. (2010). The L'Aquila Earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government Policy on Disaster Response. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, 2, 4, 325-342. Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition. (1958). London: The University of Chicago Press.

Beauducel, F. (2006). URL du site web:

http://www.ipgp.fr/~beaudu.

Beck, U. (2001). La société du risque: sur la voie d'une autre modernité. (Bernardi, L. Trad .). Paris: Aubier. Bernard, C. (1947). Principe de médecine expérimentale (1878). Paris: PUF.

Boch, J. (2007). Les périodiques et la comète de 1680. Érudition et polémique dans les périodiques anciens (XVIIe -XVIIIe siècles) (35-55). (Gevrey, F. & Lévrier, A. dir.). Reims: Épure.

Canguilhem, G. (2008). Monstrosity and the Monstrous. Knowledge of Life (Geroulanos, S. & Ginsberg, D. Transl.) (134-147). New York: Fordham University Press.

Critique (2012). Penser la catastrophe. Critique, 8-9, 783-784. Paris: Minuit.

Debray, R. (2006). Pour une sacralité profane. Médium, 1, 6, 3-22.

Devès, M. H. (2013). La science pour arbitre ? Topique, 3, 207-217.

Devès, M. H. (2013). Catastrophes naturelles et psychanalyse. Rapport de Master Recherche, Université Paris VII.

Devès, M. H. (2015). Changer avec le climat. Responsabilité et Environnement, Annales des Mines, 80, 5-9.

Doherty, T. J. & Clayton, S. (2011). The psychological

impacts of global climate change. American

Psychologist, 66(4), 265.

Freud, S. (1964). An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938). (Strachey, J. Transl.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII: Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (1937-1939). London: Hogarth Press.

Girel, M. (2013). Agnotologie : mode d'emploi. Critique, 12, 799, 964-977. Paris: Minuit.

Gulliver, S. B., Zimering, R., Carpenter, G. S., Giardina, A. & Farrar, J. (2014). The psychological consequences of disaster. Trauma and substance abuse: Causes, consequences, and treatment of comorbid disasters (125-141). Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Hall, S. S. (2011). Scientists on trial: At fault? Nature News, 477, 7364, 264-269.

Hempel, C. (1996). Éléments d’épistémologie (1957). Paris: Armand Colin.

Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human

Understanding . Essays Concerning Human

Understanding. London: A. Millar.

Kerr, R. A. (2009). After the quake, in search of the science--or even a good prediction. Science, 324, 5925, 322-322.

Klein, E. (2010). Galilée et les Indiens : allons-nous liquider la science ?. Paris: Flammarion.

Latour, B. (1991). Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte.

Lovell, A. M., Pandolfo, S., Veena, D., Laugier, S. (2013).

Face aux désastres. Paris: Les éditions d’Ithaque.

Manuel, D. (2009). La figure du monstre : phénoménologie de la monstruosité dans l'imaginaire contemporain. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy.

Martin, E. (2002). Histoire des monstres : depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (1880). Bernin: Jérôme Millon.

Poirier, J.-P. (2005). Le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne 1755. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Popper, K. (1998). [On the sources of knowledge and of ignorance. (1960)]. Des sources de la connaissance et de l'ignorance. (Launay (de), M.-I. & M. B. Trad.) Paris: Payot & Rivages.

Shelley, M. W. (1818). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones.

Siles, A.-M. & al. (2011). Urgence institutionnelle : l’institution face à l’événement traumatique, Cliniques, 2, 2, 164-185.

Vanssay (de), B. (1979). Les événements de 1976 en Guadeloupe: Apparition d’une sub-culture de désastre. Thèse de Doctorat. Centre Universitaire Antilles-Guyane, Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris V.

Notes:

1

The collective Sortir du nucléaire brought out a title in 2006 “Fusion nucléaire : Le monstre ITER, premiers dégâts sur l’environnement.” This refers to the contamination of fish and marine life by a pesticide used in banana cultivation. This was later reported in Le Monde in 2013 under the title “Guadeloupe : Monstre chimique.”

2

Distancing themselves from positivism, the

epistemologists of the twentieth century concurred that “objective truth” is an ideal that one would never be able to reach (Popper, 1985) because it is impossible to get

The author:

Maud H. Devès, PhD

PhD in Geophysics, Masters in Reseach (Psychology); specialism: Psychoanalysis and the social field. Secretary of the Scientific Council of the French Association for the Prevention of Natural Disasters (AFPCN). Associate researcher at the University of York (United Kingdom). Lecturer at the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot. Research Fellow for the program “Politics of the Earth” at the Sorbonne University of Paris Cité at Sciences Po, Paris (director: Bruno Latour) and research associate at the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris (IPGP).

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris UMR 7154

back to the source of the “truth” (Hempel, 1957). “If I ask, why you believe any particular matter of fact, which you relate, you must tell me some reason; and this reason will be some other fact, connected with it. But as you cannot proceed after this manner, in infinitum, you must at last terminate in some fact, which is present to your memory or senses; or must allow that your belief is entirely without foundation.” (Hume, 1748, E. 5. 7, SBN 46). Truth cannot be demonstrated logically. It is posited as something immanent, transcendent (the Divine Truth Revealed) or singular (the truth of the speaking subject, for psychoanalysis, for example).

3

The efficacy of a scientific discourse is not measured by the yardstick of its technical applicability. It just has to allow for the emergence of representations that will in turn be able to serve in an effective way.

4

Certainly, we still have in mind the devastation caused by the Bam earthquake (2003), by the tsunami in Sumatra (2004), by Hurricane Katrina (2005), by the Haiti earthquake (2010), the tsunami and the nuclear accident in Fukushima (2011); all of which were terrible events that were reported widely in the media. But the number of (inventoried) historical catastrophes barely covers a hundred events (see the list established by the U. S. Geological Survey).

5

One could speak in terms of systems of statements rather than of discourse, but the term discourse provides a better rendering of the dynamic character of the scientific project, which reshapes the discourse that it produces in a confrontation with the real that is constantly being renewed.

Electronic reference:

Maud H. Devès, “The Question of the Real,

From Science to Catastrophe”, Research in

Psychoanalysis [Online], 20|2015 published Dec.

30, 2015.

This article is a translation of La question du réel,

De la science à la catastrophe

Full text

Copyright

All rights reserved

1 rue Jussieu

75238 Paris cedex 05