Jérôme Lamy

La Frontière Comme Enjeu les Annales et la Sociologie

Since their beginnings in the 1930s, the Annales periodically demarcated themselves with sociology. Focusing on three decisive moments (the foundation, the Braudel moment, and the eighties), this article documents the process of boundaries drawing, which is unvaryingly at stakes in the context of institutional and epistemological disputes. The collective identity of the Annales resulted from the definition of continuously adjusted values.

Dire-vrai, aveu et discipline : Michel Foucault et les techniques de vérité

Conceived as an instrument of the self, technologies are, for Michel Foucault, the foundation of the Western constitution of the subject. The article distinguishes three stages in Foucault’s technical thinking. In Antiquity, technologies of the self are identified as instruments of mediation aiming at the most appropriate behavior. With Christendom and the emergence of the technologies of confession, they become part of dogmatic work. Finally, disciplinary technologies, which take shape in religious structures, become political relays to examine the truth of bodies.

What Management Does to Space Projects: The Franco-Soviet Project ARCAD 3 in the Late 1970s

Space projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals.

Sciences et État: note critique sur quelques propositions théoriques

The profusion of theories within science and technological studies sometimes makes it hard to find lines of direction or stable points of support. The question of the relations between scientific practices and the state affords an opportunity to appraise the differences between theoretical corpi. The present article explores three recent theoretical propositions. In the name of a neoliberal ideological foundation, the new production of knowledge has eliminated the notion of State from its conceptual horizon. Actor-network theory, suspending the structures instituted within the chain of actors, ignores the state-form. Lastly, regime of knowledge theory accords the state a special role as a source in managing the production of knowledge.

Adjusting Astronomical Practices: The “Carte du Ciel”, the democratic rules and the circulation of opinions at the end 19th century

Launched in 1887, the “Carte du Ciel” was an international project aiming at photographing the entirety of the celestial vault. Tasks required for this huge undertaking were divided among 18 observatories around the globe. Instruments were standardized and a series of international conferences established operating modes and prescribed norms to be followed everywhere. In each observatory, however, the drive toward uniformity ran into a variety of minor technical and practical problems. In this paper, we examine the strategies mobilized by observers to tinker with stated rules and adapt them to their own experience as astronomers. To underscore the tension between normative prescriptions and individual practices, we consider the Bulletin of the Permanent International Committee for the execution of the Carte du Ciel as an informal forum where various queries raised and arrangements adopted were shared among the scientific community.

The Pyrenees are not hollow: the mountain as a boundary object

In Toulouse, around 1850, a controversy about the structure of the Pyrenees pitted observatory director Frederic Petit against geology professor Alexandre Leymerie. The object of the debate was an assumption formulated by Petit: that the inside of the Pyrenees was practically hollow. This proposal was based on work that Petit initiated in order to determine the latitude of Toulouse. The debates, which took place within the Toulouse Academy of Science and also in local newspapers, illustrate the organization of disciplinary spaces in the nineteenth century. Petit defended his research method based on calculation; the geologists perspective was from the field. The emergence of the less mathematical science of geology came up against nineteenth-century astronomical practices, centered on calculation. Dissected by calculation or by visual observation, the mountain was an object of controversy from the perspective of distinct scientific practices.