Science and Public Policy 39 (2012) pp. 570–578 doi:10.

1093/scipol/scs063

Ontological politics and situated

public policies
Ivan da Costa Marques

Ivan da Costa Marques, Programa de Pós-Graduação em História das Cieˆncias e das Te´cnicas e
Epistemologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Avenida Atlântica 822/402, Rio de Janeiro,
RJ 22010-000, Brazil; E-mail: imarques@ufrj.bra

This paper calls attention to the ‘new directions’ proposed for the sociology and history of science
and technology, based on anthropological studies since the 1970s. A series of examples is then
presented, on different scales and in very diverse fields, of lines of flight and ways out from the
so-called universal and neutral frames of reference that establish themselves as overarching views
of the modern world. A way forward is then proposed for the practice of ontological politics. It is
suggested that Latin Americans can translate and modify those ‘new directions’ in order to better
prepare themselves—in the sense of being more successful in their inclusion processes—to deal
with issues that involve science and public policy.

Keywords: ontological politics; public policy; Latin America; science and technology; frames of
reference; lines of flight.

1. Introduction: ‘New directions’, frames
of reference
As I have to choose a starting point, I observe that the
1980s saw the emergence, especially in the USA and
Europe, of configurations or styles of thought that can
be appropriated in order to favor Latin Americans in ne-
gotiations that involve science and public policy. In the
1980s, Europeans and Americans entered laboratories,
using knowledge construction techniques they had de-
veloped to study the ‘culture’ of so-called ‘primitive’
communities, in order to study how scientific knowledge
is produced during the daily routine of laboratory work.
This movement marked the beginning of so-called ‘labora-
tory studies’, in which laboratories were described and
analyzed anthropologically. These laboratory studies
opened up a fertile research field in which the social
sciences—echoing previous studies (Mannheim, Fleck,
Kuhn, and Foucault)—examined the way scientific know-
ledge is produced. In a meeting that took place on 25
September 1982, in the Burg Landsberg, Deutschlandberg,
Austria, the members of the newly formed European
Association for the Study of Science and Technology laid
the foundations for a groundbreaking book, with the bold
title of The Social Construction of Technological Systems–
New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
(Bijker et al. 1987).
These ‘new directions’ led to the development of
understandings that were significantly different from
those provided so far by the sociology, philosophy and
history of science, regarding technology and scientific
truth and its universality and neutrality. Although taking
these new directions leads to a rejection of technical and
scientific determinism, it does not involve the denial of
scientific (or technological) truths, as is the case with the
relativism of absolute social constructivism. These new dir-
ections humanize scientific (or technological) truths and
facts and they become part of the array of many possible
realities in a world in flux, where hybrid entities that are
simultaneously collective, material and discursive, but
without possessing preordained forms, are configured in
relationships of support or opposition. In addition, these
new directions may lead to a world without the independ-
ent authority of ‘things-in-themselves’ in whose name sci-
entists speak, a world, as Rorty says, that would be:
. . . completely de-Platonized, where the idea that human
beings should respect an independent authority called ‘how
things are in themselves’ becomes obsolete. (Rorty 1999: 121)
In other words, these new directions relativize Western
science, removing the universal and neutral Nature
associated with it during the last few centuries.
If, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze says, things
begin in the middle, there will always be an ontology

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that precedes us. Each one of us perceives the world as a
space inhabited by identifiable entities such as gravity,
oxygen, democracy, free will, gods. These entities are
configured (or not) in the network in which each one of
us lives—and to a certain extent, chooses to live—and con-
stitute ourselves. Both oxygen and democracy, as well as
other entities, are configured within frames of reference1
that establish conventional frontiers—albeit complex and
mobile and at times not manifest—between what is
recognized and what is not recognized, between what is
present and absent, between the manifest and the latent,
between the ‘in here’ and the ‘out there’, in sum, between
what is and what is not, for example, oxygen or
democracy.
The interception by modern science and technology
(S&T) of other modes of life throughout the world takes
place on a least two levels. On the first, we can see how the
version of reality regarding illness and health put forward
by Western medicine is opposed to other types of know-
ledge, intercepting other experiences, practices, habits and
customs of all the world’s peoples. In the case of Western
medicine, the intercepting impetus becomes practically
invincible when it joins Western medicine with its techno-
logical achievements, which are certainly often spectacu-
larly effective, despite their relatively frequent negative
long-term side effects from which they cannot be com-
pletely separated, as in the case of the insecticides and
antibiotics that were launched during the 20th century. It
is clear that the evidently spectacular effectiveness some-
times achieved by modern S&T, in medicine, armaments
and many other fields, is exactly the point where the
‘knowledge equals power’ equation becomes immediately
and actually visible.2
But in this paper, I wish to draw attention to a second
level where modern S&T meet with power: the power to
define reality. Even global entities, such as insecticides and
antibiotics, are only configured within frames of reference
and all frames of reference have overflows: what econo-
mists term ‘externalities’.
When a proposition is put into circulation as a ‘candi-
date as a fact’ during the production of scientific know-
ledge, it will only become a scientific fact if it proves to be
sufficiently robust or hard enough to triumph in those
situations in which it is tested. These tests are usually per-
formed under laboratory conditions: that is, reductionist
processes are put in place which control which elements
will be considered or, in other words, frames of reference
are created to examine where the ‘candidate-to-fact’ prop-
osition lies on a fact–fiction continuum. During this
process, when the proposition becomes obdurate or
hardens into fact, it is modified and also modifies the
frames of reference in which it is hardened into fact.
Propositions that are hardened into facts within scientific
frames of reference stabilize provisionally and conven-
tionally through the juxtapositioning of heterogeneous
elements.3
Ontological politics and situated public policies . 571
Propositions that harden into scientific truths, to
which universality and neutrality are attributed, act and
strengthen their builders/inventors/discoverers and all
those who share them. Supported by scientific truths and
facts, they are strengthened for the disputes that occur
during the division of the world that establishes perceived
reality. Once a proposition is hardened into fact (that is,
hardened into a scientific truth that appears to be a natural
element or entity), it is able to confer a type of inescapable
self-evidence on what is done in its name or due to it. This
is the second level I mentioned above, another type of
power, associated with those that produce scientific facts.
It is no longer a matter of intercepting other modes of life
through the explicit effects of modern scientific know-
ledge—which are in any case overwhelming—but of inter-
cepting the ability to create the versions of reality of the
other modes of life. On this second level, one specifically
encounters a power to assert and make evident that
a version of reality is reality, thus bestowing a type of
ethical mission on those who share a scientific fact, with
which they enter the actual political field in a particularly
important, albeit sly and surreptitious, fashion when
dealing with public issues.
In order to present this second level of science’s encoun-
ter with power, I will give another example: the power
of science in the creation of a labor market in England
during the 1830s. (Polanyi 1944/2000) describes in
masterly fashion how the frames of reference that had
become hardened in the then-nascent science of economics
managed to unite men who were as ‘diametrically opposed
in method and outlook’ as Townsend, Malthus and
Ricardo, Bentham and Burke in opposition to the main-
tenance of the Poor Law, that hindered the transformation
of peasants (poor) into salaried workers:
[The] creation of a labor market was an act of vivisection per-
formed on the body of society [English society of the first half
of the 19th century] by such as were steeled to their task by an
assurance which only science can provide. That the Poor Law
must disappear was part of this certainty. ‘The principle of
gravitation is not more certain than the tendency of such
laws to change wealth and vigor into misery and weakness,
until at last all classes should be infected with the plague of
universal poverty’ wrote Ricardo. He would have been, indeed
a moral coward who, knowing this, failed to find the strength
to save mankind from itself by the cruel operation of the
abolishment of poor relief . . . What made economic liberalism
an irresistible force was this congruence of opinion between
diametrically opposed outlooks; for what the ultra-reformer
Bentham and the ultra-traditionalist Burke equally approved of
automatically, took on the character of self-evidence. (Polanyi
1944/2000: 154–5) (emphasis added)
During the course of recent centuries, a great number of
self-evident propositions were constituted simultaneously,
strengthening frames of reference that resulted in the
metrologies (Latour 1987) of the modern world, a large
number of which were cast into doubt at the end of the
572 . I. da Costa Marques
20th century. There are countless examples of various
types: how was it established for more than a century
that one should remunerate the extraction of oil but not
the process that treats the pollution it causes—a frame of
reference that is currently the subject of heated debate?
Who constructed the division between science and belief,
making it easier for science to become a remunerated
activity, in contrast to belief which is not? Who established
the division between an illegal, so-called pirate, copy and
the free and inevitable utilization of knowledge that is
already in circulation, thus constructing frames of refer-
ence for the expansion of intellectual property rights? Who
constructs the frames of reference that underpin the clas-
sification of the academic journals that establish
hierarchies in academia, and the criteria used in the distri-
bution of funds for the production of knowledge?
In addition—although much less evident because it
involves a very obdurate entity of physics—who con-
structed the frames of reference that establish the
division between what an electron does and what it does
not do? Or, in other words, who configured, constructed,
invented, discovered the electron? The electron is an entity
that is defined by a set of performances in the world or,
should one say, in the laboratories of physics. It is a
stabilized entity precisely because physicists agree about
it, among the inscriptions4 that they obtain in the labs,
which are performed by the electron and which are not.
And who made the division between what the electron
does and does not do? Latour recounts how the electron
(an object that had not yet acquired a form) was
configured at the beginning of the 20th century. In order
to define the electron, a heterogeneous group of entities
(people, institutions, things, equipment, and attitudes)
were juxtaposed: an important scientist, his students, a
large company’s resources, apparatus, economic strategy
and competition, phenomena or actions of the entity re-
searched (inscriptions in the apparatus) and consumers of
telephone services. When juxtaposed, all the above entities
moved and:
. . . something else has moved too. The electrons. The list of
actions that defined their being has been dramatically
increased when all these laboratories submitted them to new
and unexpected trials. Domesticated electrons have been made
to play a role in a convoluted alliance that allows the Bell
Company to triumph over its rivals. In the end, each actor
in this little story has been pushed out of its usual way and
made to be different, because of the new alliances it has been
forced to enter. (Latour 1991/1994: 208–9)
Before Robert Millikan’s (Nobel Prize winner in 1923)
association with Bell, the electron was a scientific object
that was being constructed or developed and did not have
a preordained, universal and neutral form, a consensual
list of what it did and the status of something, an entity,
that had always been present in another entity, known as
Nature.
In general, when collectives are not in a position to
mobilize the cognitive and political resources necessary to
construct the frames of reference (versions of reality) that
favor them, their lives, at least relatively speaking, are made
more difficult. When science encounters public policy, sci-
entific frames of reference usually appear on the scene as
naturalized entities, that is, stabilized as universal and
neutral and constituting a part of Nature that science—
whose mission it is to discover—has already discovered.
I propose ‘new directions’ to enable us gain our bearings
on this second level of the relations between science and
power. What I seek to suggest in this paper is that—duly
observing differences between countries—it is worthwhile
for policy-makers, in Brazil and Latin America as a whole,
to explore lines of flight and ways out of these naturalized
frames of reference.
2. Colonizers–colonized and lines of flight
Instead of using the words ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ with
their historically specific variations in meaning, I am seeking
another meaning here. I seek to associate ‘colonize’ with an
asymmetry that can be found at all times—micro and
macro—during the process of construction of the
so-called global modern world. In general terms, this asym-
metry permits the identification (always provisional) of
those who are capable enough, or feel a greater propensity,
to establish the rhythm of modern constructions, in contrast
to those who are perceived as being more compelled or
inclined to follow their rhythm, those who are considered
to be dominant as opposed to those who are dominated.
I do not see the ‘colonizer–colonized’ dichotomy as an
opposition between entities with well-defined frontiers but
as a tension, and I try to problematize it in the networks
that link heterogeneous entities (objects, people, institu-
tions, practices, and facts). The way I configure it in this
communication, the colonizer–colonized tension may
resonate with, and in diverse instances, become similar to
many contemporary tensions, such as those between North
and South, Europeans and Non-Europeans, black and
white or Indian, or even between the sexes.
The relations between science and public policy in Latin
America refer us back to Latin America’s relations with
modernity:
The significance of the Iberian case becomes evident when we
consider that the religious and scientific revolutions, in their
trajectories of incidence, did not divide Europe clearly in two.
Protestantism prospered along an east–west septentrional axis,
whereas ‘science’ developed along a north–south axis, sloped
towards the Italian peninsula. (Morse 1988: 36)
The participation of many men and few European
(Portuguese) women in the occupation of the colony’s
vast territory that was to become Brazil led to a peculiar
colonization process. According to Ribeiro (1995), Brazil-
ians were first of all configured as a ‘new people’, one that

was not Portuguese (European, colonizer) because their
mothers were Indian (native, colonized), but were not
Indians because their fathers were Portuguese.
Similarly, Gomes (1982: 245), analyzing the colonization
process in Brazil, wrote that:
. . . the peculiarities of this process, in which the colonizer
created the colonized in his own image, making the colonized,
up to a certain point, his equal. Psychologically, the colonized
and the colonizer did not see themselves in their roles.
The S&T studies of the last few decades have shown that
political decisions taken during the process that establishes
those frames of reference that are regarded as trustworthy
are erased, for what appears as the final arbiter of disputes,
when scientific arguments triumph, is that great collecting
entity known as ‘Nature’.5 And the moderns (colonizers)
managed to convince many people all over the world that
Nature is a neutral and universal entity, which exists and
has its own forms that are independent from the other
great collecting entity created by them, known as Society.
By dividing phenomena and entities into those that occur
or exist in Nature and those that occur or exist in Society
(electrons in Nature, market occupation strategies in
Society) modern colonizers are doubly benefited:
. They have been able to establish the divide at a point
which seems to be more adequate in terms of their
local contingencies, which, however, appeared as uni-
versal and neutral at the end of the division
. They have been able to speak in the name of a
so-called universal and neutral Nature that they them-
selves created, for they are the ones who—over the last
few centuries—conquered and accumulated the re-
sources6 that enabled them to establish scientific
truths and colonize the rest of the world.
And the science of modern colonizers only accepts a dis-
cussion of reality in its own terms, in a process in which
reason supports force and force supports reason.
I suggest that the most profitable use that colonizer–
colonized can today make of the knowledge that has
already been established in the field of S&T studies, is pre-
cisely to use it to improve their ability to discern the
possibilities of exploiting lines of flight or ways out from
naturalized frames of reference. Opening up the unity of
the complex colonizer–colonized entity, one can say that
this is the best course of action for the colonized precisely
because it can enable them to find, construct or adopt lines
of flight from the frames of reference that emanate from
the colonizers’ centers of calculation as if they were
endowed with universality and neutrality, placing their
local knowledge (of the colonized) at a disadvantage in
relation to the ‘globalization’ of the ‘colonizers’. And in
the case of the colonizers, S&T studies provide them with
the means to escape their own prison and acquire flexibility
to enter into an explicit dialogue with the colonized,
enabling them to negotiate without demanding that all
Ontological politics and situated public policies . 573
accept the reality they propose, centered in their own
terms—a situation typical of modernity that is no longer
sustainable, given the present emergence of the colonized,
with China and India at the forefront. I now present five,
intentionally disparate, examples of ‘lines of flight’.
2.1.1 Example 1. The frame of reference is a mathe-
matics class in Rio de Janeiro. The teacher (colonizer)
gives an example of a 69 year-old lady athlete who had
swum for a third of her life. The class’s frame of reference
demarks a territory in which it is implicit that the students
(colonized) will ask and conclude that the lady athlete
swam for 23 years of her life. But one student takes a
line of flight from the class’s frame of reference and asks:
‘how many medals did she win?’
2.1.2 Example 2. A (colonized) poor woman who lives in
a favela (shanty town) in Rio de Janeiro, wins a prize of
about R$3.000,00 and a TV station goes to her hut to
interview her. The (colonizer) journalist asks:
What are you going to do with the prize money?
The woman replies:
I’m going to buy a television set.
The camera takes a 360 shot of the whole hut. The
journalist asks:
But you don’t have a refrigerator!
The woman retorts:
I don’t need a fridge to preserve the kind of food I eat.
Her reply de-territorializes implicit (and moral) pre-
agreements or frames of rationality related, in this case,
to consumption needs seen from the immediate perspective
of more educated people (in which a fridge ‘should’ come
‘before’ a television set).7
2.1.3 Example 3. This scene comes from 50 years ago.
The employees of a sawmill in the Pantanal Wetland
region between Brazil and Paraguay are all (colonized)
Indians. Every year, about November, it is the season for
the guavira, a wild fruit much appreciated by them. They
all abandon work to go off into the woods to pick this
tasty little fruit. The manager of the sawmill (colonizer),
completely at a loss, tried to put an old Indian to shame:
Even you, Clemêncio, an old Indian stops work to pick
guavira. Aren’t you ashamed?
Clemêncio simply replied:
Guavira finishes, there is always work!
Thus Clemêncio has demolished the frame of reference
constructed by the manager.
574 . I. da Costa Marques
It is noteworthy that, although one cannot say that the
(colonized) European worker managed to keep this line of
flight open, he was indeed aware of the limitations of the
type of narrow point of view held by the manager and
‘those that hold the secrets of brute power’ (colonizers)
in their specialized activities. Morse reminds us of how
Stephen Blackwood, the perplexed proletarian of Charles
Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), for whom the economy was ‘a
complete mess’, saw his fate:
Yes, sir, devil of a mess we’ve got ourselves into [. . .] You
see the way we live and the place we live in, all on top of
each other, and this humdrum life, without a future;
and look at how the factory never stops, and never
takes us closer to anything – I mean, only to Death. (Morse
1990: 170)
Today . . . finally, and still with enormous difficulty, the
international community recognizes what Ribeiro claims
to be ‘Rondon’s main innovation’ regarding relations
with the Indian peoples in Brazil: the ‘right to difference’
(Ribeiro 1995: 147).
2.1.4 Examples from Morse. In the following examples,
the flight could be obtained by refusing to make:
. . . a substantial investment in fees for consultants from
famous foreign universities. (Morse 1990: 194)
It is precisely these foreign or Latin American colonizer-
academics who are the best placed to configure the
megalomaniac tendencies of the colonized into the
elaborate casuisms, transformed into axioms, that are
necessary to engender the translation of the rationality of
economic science into the euphoric beliefs of the
colonized’s triumphalism (Morse 1990: 194):
(1) Constructing an immense junction of viaducts in the
city so that bureaucrats can save ten minutes going to
their offices, where they perform unproductive work,
is a better investment than 50 thousand bicycles for
peasants;
(2) The chronic shortage of basic foodstuffs is less
important than always being able to buy J&B
whisky, records (Vivaldi and rock), TV sets,
Volkswagen beetles and translations of Lenin and
Milton Friedman;
(3) The money sent from Tucson or Los Angeles to their
families in their countries of origin is spent less
efficiently than intergovernmental donations filtered
by two national bureaucracies;
(4) The consumers one should have in mind in a Latin
American country that is undergoing an
industrialization process are the Guatemalan and
Bolivian elites and not the poorest citizens of these
countries.
2.1.5 Final example. In his first version, Lobato
portrayed Jeca Tatu8 as the indolent, heedless and
parasitical character who configures the hillbilly from the
interior of São Paulo, whose image he afterwards
developed into that of the caboclo, as Jeca Tatu is trans-
formed from literary object into an object of sociological
research. Jeca Tatu’s first image can be summed up by the
expression ‘it just isn’t worthwhile’:
Confronted with the problems on the farm where he was an
‘agregado’ (unproductive farmhand) or the great changes in
national political life, such as the abolition of slavery or the
proclamation of the Republic, the ‘caboclo’ continued to
‘squat, dozing, on his haunches’. . . ‘all the ‘caboclo’s’
ignorant philosophizing prattles in this word transfixed by
fatalism and apathy. Nothing is worthwhile. Neither culture
nor conveniences. Life goes on anyway’. (Lobato (1957: 284)
cited by Lima and Hochman (2004: 510–11))
In his second version, the issue of integrating the people
of the interior into national life constitutes the reference in
which another Jeca Tatu is portrayed. The apparent line of
flight or way out from the first frame of reference appears
in the encounter with intellectuals and proposals in
support of the expansion of basic sanitation in Brazil in
the period 1916–20. Alongside the sanitation campaigns
and medical scientists’ reports of their trips to the
interior, Lobato revives Jeca Tatu, attributing the
diseases to the ‘caboclo’s’ laziness. Jeca Tatu’s second
image can be summed up as follows:
Jeca is not really like that; it’s just the way he is now. (In
Portuguese: Jeca não é assim, está assim.)
When he began to believe in medical science and its
prescriptions, Jeca Tatu was transformed. Free from
hookworm disease, and the state of permanent despondency
it caused, he became productive and, in no time at all, a
prosperous farmer, competing with his Italian neighbor and
rapidly overtaking him. More than that: he modernized his
farm, introduced new crops and technologies and learned to
speak English . . . (Lima and Hochman 2004: 511)
3. Ontological politics
I agree with Lima and Hochman when they state that Jeca
Tatu’s strength lies precisely in the change of frame of
reference, when they say that:
Jeca Tatu’s strength lies in the loss of his specific reference to
the ‘agregado’ or unproductive rural worker, when he achieves
the dimension of a national symbol. (Lima and Hochman
2004: 511–2)
However, my question is: with whom does Jeca Tatu’s
strength ally?
From the perspective of those who are looking for
relations between science and public policies, the ‘new
directions’ that appeared on the horizon during the
1980s, suggest research focused on the material study of

the ‘ontological politics’ or ‘empirical philosophy’ involved
in the construction of frames of reference in which the
complex unity of the two Jeca Tatus is configured: Who
do these frames of reference benefit? Which options and
decisions are naturalized and thus do not appear as
options and decisions and their alternatives are not
discussed? Which options and decisions lead to the
distribution of benefits and difficulties and are thus
political, but are in fact represented and discussed as if
they were ‘technical’ problems (with specialists responsible
for finding solutions)? Thus, rather than attributing a
meaning (a truth) to frames of reference, the main
concern should be to reveal the mechanisms through
which they are stabilized.
When the entities that inhabit the world of ontological
politics appear, they are usually naturalized as universal
and neutral elements belonging to Nature (things-in-
themselves) or, alternatively, they remain implicit, erased
in the diffusion of resulting frames of reference. They are—
to use Law’s term—‘otherized’. That is, they become an
‘other’, in the sense of something that acts but is not
represented, something that interferes from outside the
field of representation (Law 2004).
Both Andrade’s denunciation ‘of those who wanted to
eliminate Jeca Tatu’ (Andrade 1981/1943) and that by
Barbosa, indicate where to look for entrances to the lines
of flight that could lead us to territories where the hidden
materiality of the ontological politics practiced by right- or
left-wing Brazilian intellectuals could be found:
But gentlemen, if this [colonized Jeca Tatu] is what they [the
colonizers] see, is this really what we [the Brazilians] are?
Aren’t the Brazilian people more than just a specimen of the
most ignorant ‘caboclo’, who can’t even stand on his feet, or
even sit, a manifestation of all the stigmas of indolence
and stupidity, whose vote can be bought with a role of
tobacco, a suit of coarse cloth and a swig of rum? (Barbosa
1919/1981: 174)
What entities operate but are not represented (are
‘otherized’) in the universe inhabited by Jeca Tatu? What
hypotheses were naturalized when choosing the elements
used to describe the two Jeca Tatus? Why choose fatalism,
the instinctive distrust of civilization, a habitual indolence,
quackery, nomadism, the idea of the predatory
exploitation of the land, productivity? Considering the
materiality, one asks: what is and what is not included in
the accounting and comparison (metrology)? What is
included in the advantageous modernization of
agriculture? What is included in the overarching view of
progress as a universal and neutral blessing? What transla-
tions were performed to establish the equivalence between
health and modern development? Why was an American
farmer adopted as a model or idealization of the rural
‘entrepreneur’? Why is English being used as the lingua
franca?
Ontological politics and situated public policies . 575
In all this, frontiers and hierarchies are established
between the best and the worst, and the options, decisions
and questions that situate the resulting frames of reference
(given that they are treated as universal and neutral) rarely
appear. In addition, no evaluation is ever made of their
associated materialities: good or bad; better or worse for
whom; for what; where and when.
Returning to the second level of the relationship
between science and power, I suggest that the ontological
politics that constructed the two Jecas Tatus as opposing
figures enact the same frame of reference and privilege the
same values: the dominant values of European coloni-
zation, denying them to the despised first Jeca Tatu and
then endowing the praised second Jeca Tatu with them.
Thus, instead of escaping from his situation’s frame of
reference, Jeca Tatu does not perform a line of flight. In
fact, he reinforces that frame of reference.
It would be possible to enumerate an almost infinite
number of situations and possible points of entry to the
most diverse lines of flight or ways out.9 However, to
follow the lines of flight would be to act in a deleterious
fashion, on the margins of a supposed structure that
constitutes the colonizer’s axiomatic backbone. The
classic entity with its stabilized frames of reference, from
which the lines of flight intend to escape, is the dominant
or prevailing social order. The worthlessness associated
with the lines of flight that lead to changes in stabilized
frames of reference, is due to the fact that they are
considered to represent an applicable attack on the social
order. Hence, the attitude of those that take the lines of
flight is considered to be a bad example and may even be
treated in special institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals
or prisons, as has been clearly illustrated by Michael
Foucault’s famous work.
But what mechanisms are at work in the estrangement
associated with the adoption of these lines of flight? What
is going on here? What produces this estrangement? The
‘new directions’ in the studies of the development of
knowledge strongly suggest that estrangement always
appears on the frontiers that the lines of flight cross
when they pass from one version of reality to the other:
from the reality of the sums and the medals for the teacher-
colonizer and for the colonized-student; from that of the
television and the refrigerator for the journalist-colonizer
and the poor colonized favela dweller; from the work and
‘leisure’ for the colonizer-manager and for the colonized-
Indian; from the fees paid to famous academic consultants
and critics to conformist-colonizer intellectuals and
resigned-colonized intellectuals.
Although the estrangement of the lines of flight is
located on the frontiers between two or more versions of
reality that cross them, we learn in S&T studies that these
frontiers are not necessarily actual frontiers between
knowledge and ignorance, fact and fiction, truth and
fraud as the colonizers believe and would have us also
believe, but rather frontiers between different versions of
576 . I. da Costa Marques
reality. We also learn that reality does really exist, in each
spatial–temporal singularity, but that it does not have a
preordained form and we must content ourselves with
versions of reality that can co-exist. We learn that we
inhabit a world of entities, including ourselves, that are
narrated, but are not mere discourse: are collectives but
are not social because they are not restricted to the
‘purely human’, and are natural but do not have a
preordained form (Latour 1991/1994). This dynamic of a
world in flux cannot sustain a unique centered reality such
as the idea of Nature that prevailed in European science
during the past few centuries, but only permits versions of
reality without, however, falling into social construc-
tivism’s absolute relativism.
But if that is the way things are, why don’t we see things
in this way? If we were prepared for the relativity of
multiple versions of reality, could we live with the
estrangement caused precisely by the removal of one of
them? Recent S&T studies suggest that we can find a
relevant answer to these questions if we examine how the
reality we today regard as the most trustworthy—that
reality or world inhabited by objects, facts and laws that
are supposedly totally independent of what men do
amongst themselves, that the supposedly universal and
neutral reality that scientists talk about—is established.
The new directions led Europeans themselves to undertake
studies showing that the sciences actually produce an
ontology, that is, they create worlds—not just physics,
chemistry, biology, mathematics, but also the human
sciences and history itself—as well as explain them. And
how have the sciences managed to conquer the privilege of
creating the reality they talk about and present it to the
world as something that ‘is there’, universal and neutral? It
is precisely here that we find the veiled maneuver that
contributed to the sly and surreptitious excess of power
granted to European science over the past few centuries.
A division is made during the scientific knowledge
construction process, which configures one version of
reality and removes and excludes others. This work of
division historically involved—and continues to do so
today—decisions regarding the distribution of what is
more and what is less valuable, what path should be
taken, what and who should be included and what and
who should be left out, decisions that are certainly political
and which benefit some and create difficulties for others
(Shapin and Schaffer 1985). But this work of division is
erased and denied after a certain proposition becomes
obdurate and is stabilized as a scientific truth. It is
exactly at this point that it becomes part of a universal
and neutral reality. As the process of division that occurs
during the construction of scientific knowledge is not
represented, the scientific objects, facts and laws are
naturalized, becoming part of an entity separated from
the world of man known as Nature.10 The veiled
maneuver that was only ethnographically revealed by the
laboratory studies of the 1980s, is that Nature is not ‘out
there’, with preexisting and preordained forms waiting to
be discovered, but is rather the result of the work of
science, from which the process of division that established
the frames of reference within which scientific objects, facts
and laws prevail, was erased. Many cases have been
studied, based on the laboratory studies of the 1980s.11
And it is scientists, engineers, technicians, specialists and
experts that speak in Nature’s name.
Morse observed that:
. . . when experts govern, violence is the last resort, or even—
unfortunately the first. (Morse 1990:179)
Amongst those who live on Brazilian soil, some have
realized before others that experts have vested interests
and ‘ignore basic processes’.12
But these specialists are not yet able to contribute to a
satisfactory solution. A series of vicious circles will appear
before. The scientists mentioned are only able to see the
‘caboclo’ from their specialty’s perspective . . . For doctors,
the ‘caboclo’ is ill and undernourished; for the educator all
the ‘evil’ resides in illiteracy; the agronomist verifies the
complete lack of ‘rational’ knowledge of agriculture; the
economists see a lack of credit, markets and means of
transport; the moralists want to eradicate certain vices and
so on. (Willens 1944/2009: 206)
S&T studies teach us that both the specialists of the so-
called natural or exact sciences, like physics, chemistry,
biology, and mathematics, and those engaged in the so-
called human or social sciences, such as philosophy,
sociology, anthropology, and history, erase the process
of division and enact the Nature versus Society divide.13
However, quite often human and social science specialists
have been called upon by the right and left to salvage the
colonizing undertaking. Lima and Hochman (2004: 519)
observe that:
. . . both Emı́lio Willens and others he in part inspired,
including Florestan Fernandes, were adamant on perceiving
areas of resistance to modernization and the need for social
scientists to play an active role in the ‘planned change’
required. In sum, they were defending the adoption by the
government and local administrations of social techniques
-informed by the work of specialists in the area of the social
sciences- which could provide inputs for a ‘policy of control
and guidance of social processes, where possible.
In other words, the veiled maneuver is performed by
scientists but neither the left nor the right appear to see
it. And although it was first revealed by Europeans, why
should it be especially important for the Latin Americans
to denounce and make explicit this veiled maneuver, this
erasing of the process of division that constructs the
modern separation between Nature and Society? The
consequence of this denunciation and explicitation can
be understood in the specificities of the relation that
Latin Americans maintain with the West based as Morse
says, on an understanding of the ‘Iberian case’. More

specifically, this denunciation helps make lines of flight
respectable and legitimate, by situating the worthlessness
associated with them in the circumscriptions of versions of
reality constructed by the colonizer. With the appearance
of ontological politics the complex colonizer–colonized
unity has increased its actual political space enormously.
Universal and neutral science was neither created by Latin
America, nor even by Portugal and Spain, and was never a
cognitive and political ally of the Iberian peoples, old or
new. If actions, even atrocities, have to be justified in some
instances if they are to have any lasting influence,
ontological politics deprives the colonizer of the justifi-
cation and even the moral courage that ‘only [universal
and neutral] science can offer’ to practice atrocities or
‘true acts of vivisection in the body of society’, as
Polanyi (1944/2000) wrote.
Concluding with a focus on my own country, the
proposal is that, in the diversity of spaces that Brazil is
composed of and in each complex colonizer–colonized unit
(which may be inhabited by an individual or much larger
collectives) the colonizer–colonized should forego a
centered reality that effectively comes from the West, but
in whose name local colonizers seek to speak and act, and
recognize the legitimacy of a world where the most that
can be obtained is versions of reality that are enacted with
a greater or lesser degree of support. This may not seem
much, but S&T studies provide the theoretical basis that
can enable:
. . . the descendants of those negroes, Indians and mestizos to
dare think that this country is a republic that should be
governed by their will as its people, which indeed they are.
(Ribeiro 1995: 247)
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on a presentation made at the
symposium on ‘The use of scientific knowledge for social
cohesion’, at the invitation of its coordinator, Professor
Hebe Vessuri, which was held during the VIII Jornadas
de Estudios Sociales de las Ciencias y las Tecnologı́as
(VIII ESOCITE) held 20–23 July 2010, in Buenos Aires.
Although it was presented during an academic meeting of
social scientists specializing in the study of S&T, this study
aims to reach a wider audience and, in particular, the more
diffuse professional group of so-called policy-makers.
Notes
1. The relations between these relational entities are pro-
visionally stabilized by convention and cohesion in
collectives of humans and things (actor–network
theory). See Law and Hassard (1999). Law (2004)
speaks of a ‘hinterland.’ Here I use the words
‘frames of reference’ repeatedly to refer to a provi-
sional set of entities through which a collective
creates and sustains a version of reality. For an
Ontological politics and situated public policies . 577
excellent presentation of a specific example of
‘frames of reference’ that will undoubtedly be
recognized by policy-makers, see Callon (1998).
2. A great deal has been written about Brazil’s encounter
with modern medicine. Here I would like to highlight
the studies by Cukierman (2007) and Kropf (2009).
3. For descriptions and analyses of this ‘purification
process’ in which a proposition becomes hardened
into a scientific fact, see Latour (1987, 1991/1994).
4. An inscription is the trace of a specific situation
produced by a research instrument. See Latour
(1987: 64–68).
5. See ‘The appeal (to/of) Nature’ in Latour (1987).
6. These resources emanate from laboratories, that, pur-
portedly, ‘discover’ Nature, whereas S&T studies of
the last few decades have shown that it would be
more accurate to say that they ‘create-invent-con-
struct-describe-discover’ Nature.
7. This resonates perfectly with Bruno Latour’s analyses
of irrationality as accusation (Latour 1987: 180–95).
8. Jeca Tatu is a genial creation of Monteiro Lobato, the
Paulista writer and farmer. He is an extremely popular
and naı̈ve literary character who represents the Brazil
of the hillbillies, of the interior, of the backlands, rural
man, a character who immortalized and was immor-
talized in films by the actor Amácio Mazzaropi. Even
breaking all domestic box office records, he was hated
by the (colonizer) critics. <http://www.caiman.de/
jecapo.html> accessed 20 September 2012
9. Elsewhere (Marques 2005), I have written a detailed
account of the line of flight from the ‘free market’
frame of reference taken by technological industrial
policy in Brazil, whose aim was to develop an autoch-
thonous minicomputer technology.
10. Or, paradoxically, of another collecting entity,
Society, that is separate from Nature, but has its
own natural laws that are independent of human
will. For a clear explanation steeped in materiality,
see Latour (1987, 1991/1994).
11. Handbooks of S&T studies. For a survey that is par-
ticularly relevant for policy-makers, see Mackenzie
(2006).
12. Outside of actor–network theory, the expression,
‘basic processes’, could easily resonate with ‘onto-
logical politics’ provided it refers to specific cases.
13. ‘How could we take so many precautions, not
believing straightaway what scientists and engineers
say about objectivity and subjectivity, and believe im-
mediately what other scientists (social scientists) say
about society, culture and economics?’ (Latour 1987).
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