Concluding remarks for our PAI "Testing expertise" meeting.
These remarks are centered around the connection of the "public" question (how to address it, what does "it" have to say) and the reliability of expertise.

Some concluding remarks

Isabelle Stengers

While I was listening and trying to imagine how to conclude this fruitful day, it came to my mind that the subject of this meeting "Testing expertise" had a double meaning. The obvious one would be : asking demanding questions about expert knowledge, its relevance and validity, the roles it plays, the limitations it entails or should entail. But the second one would could be expanded as "testing time for expertise", meaning that expertise today is confronted with new difficulties, demands and questions it may not be equipped to answer. Our very meeting then enacts this new testing situation of experts.

We should, I believe, never forget that we get is what we collectively, institutionally deserve. That is we should avoid incriminating experts as people since what they are, the way they conceive their charge and duty, are first and foremost the result of the way their role was defined. This includes the fact that nowhere in the scientific education there is a place for the question of expertise, for the role, duties, demands, and traps associated with being enrolled as an expert. Also, while scientists are very careful about the quality and reliability of each others contributions to their common disciplines, they usually turn a rather blind eye to the performance of their colleagues when they function as experts. In other words, they may well feel collectively responsible for the advancement of their disciplinary field but, usually, not in the way an answer is given to out of the boundary questions, questions which quasi by definition exceed the limits of what is, from their discipline’s point of view, a matter of reliable knowledge. It is a bit as if it were the ones who chose the experts who bear now the responsibility for the way the problem is framed.

Expertise is commonly defined by scientists as a service to the society which sustains their research, something you should accept to do, and to the best of your means, but something which leaves the responsibility for the issue to "society" which enrolled you.

Scientists who would roar "Lyssenko" if anybody came and told them how to deal with a question in their field, thus mostly accept that "in the outside" they think and work where they are told to. As Daniel Debeer showed, if they know that they have to work in the legal framework which defines risks as what should be managed in order for the freedom of the market to rule, they will adapt and propose "economically viable" measures only.

Again, the problem is not with individuals, but with the framing of the issues, the scientists just understanding quite well what was asked and what was not. If times are now testing it is because this framing process is more and more at stake in public controversies, and in particular in the case of the GMO event about which we did hear this morning.

One of the many aspects of this "event" is that it is not only testing expertise, it also clearly puts at stake the role of "public servants". I rather love this term, "public servants", servants of the public, with its potential open connotation. While "fonctionnaires" do function, that is are defined as functioning parts of the State, public servants’ role appears to depend on the public they have to serve, and the "public" now seems to ask new questions, questions it was not meant to ask.
Nathalie Trussart spoke about an atmospheric public.

Indeed the question was asked rather often, in the GMO case : but what is the public really "thinking", "asking", "refusing" ? How do we know ? To use the term atmosphere means first to avoid thinking that the answer to such questions would be potentially there, just waiting to be measured : we would have then the right representation of what "they" "really" think. Indeed you can measure the atmospheric pressure, and it may be quite sufficient when the weather is calm. But when issues are concerned, the problem is more like characterizing an unstable atmospheric situation, the most dramatic example of which being situations where a spinning tornado may or may not suddenly form and then destroy everything on its path. In such situations, average properties like pressure are no longer sufficient. When the weather becomes unstable, other measuring devices and complex models must come into play. And each one actualizes not a potential property meant to be always there, ready to be measured, but an aspect of one of the many "issues" which together produce our understanding of the weather instability.

When a public issue is concerned, the public is to be conceived not as a potential to be measured but as a "virtual", the actualization of which implies the operation of many "actualization devices". Election maybe one of these devices, and the famous "perception of the public research is an other one, mainly devoted to the question of the precise distribution of the many ways the public’s "opinion" may be dismissed, its "perception" being explained away as the result of general variables (bad information, irrational conviction, fear, attachment to a tradition, etc.) But at the occasion of the GMO event, other devices were experimented. There are the different PTA procedures, but also research ones. For instance the European research program PABE (Public Perception of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Europe) was, for a sociologists’ network, the opportunity to experiment the possibility of addressing people as thinking beings and not as "having an opinion" to be expressed and measured. They were provided the kind of conditions where the actualization of their capacity to think was possible. What was then measured was the result of a collective process around a matter of concern, not a "matter of fact". And the result was quite interesting because the questions and objections produced were rather remarkable. They were not opinions or fears but considerate doubts about the consequences of the introduction of GMO and the way they had been envisaged. Also questions about the reliability of the promised follow up of the eventual risks : were the means of this follow up, the people, the money, the procedures stabilized ? In other words, I would say that the "public" as actualized declined to say yes or no but rather asked : are the promises worth the risks ?; are we technically and institutionally ready for those risks ? Their problem was not "GMOs as such" but their proliferation in our societies. Are we ready ? Are we worthy of the kind of adventures they may induce ?

We could even speculate that their was an actualization of doubts about the "division of work" between the public and the State as described by Dewey and Lippman, and recalled here by Bruno Latour : when an issue which mobilized a public appears to have been adequately taken in charge, citizens may go back and rest in peace. It maybe that they know that some issues need "accompaniment", are not to be left unchecked to States or stakeholders routines. Indeed the workers Unions, in Belgium, did believe and trust that the specific "droit du travail", which had been a political conquest, was secure because it was translated into law. They were wrong since they did not envisage as a matter of concern that others did not accept the situation as final, that is that it was for them a matter of very active concern to quietly undo what had been done. This is what has happened and the droit du travail is now in the process of being silently dismantled.

The actualized public questions are thus good questions. At least, they are akin to the ones which turned rather quiet citizens like myself into protagonists of the GMO debate. By the way, the success of the protest movement is in itself an actualizing device, because it did imply a rather special kind of attention from the media, that is also the guess of the media people concerning their public. The very fact that our IAP took GMO as a matter of concern and not UFOs, Unidentified Flying Objects, for example, is also a testimony. We may be researchers, but we are also part of the public actualizing itself around the issue. The first point is not then what we think, but that we think that it matters, that it has become a matter of concern.

The question of who is legitimately "representing" the public may be legitimately asked when PTA procedures parade as decisions procedures. Indeed as Laurent De Sutter remarked, "representation is what counts in order to constitute those for whom it counts". It is thus rather normal that those stakeholders for whom the "constitution" of the people who are habilitated to take a decision is a very serious matter of concern would contest the "democratic" legitimacy of people who were never elected. For many scientists I discussed with, the legitimacy for "the society" to decide is accepted, and the more comfortably so since its decision will come after scientific expertise and advice. But activists, who are an "unelected" minority, are seen by those as undemocratic, as a threat against democracy. Scientists usually do no see themselves as a minority, but as a source of legitimacy to be counterbalanced only the legitimacy of a democratically expressed majority.

However if the public is taken as a virtual atmosphere, it is a public without a face, without a mouth to utter the words legitimating a "majority" position around particular issues. Election and other averaging devices indeed produce such a mouth, but the words this average mouth is able to utter are quasi by definition irrelevant for issues and concerns. Those need actualizing devices producing other types of voices, having an other kind of power because they were "empowered" by the device. They testify for the public not so much in terms of "yes" or "no" answers but in terms of those questions, doubts, concerns which, at a time, are able to actualize themselves in the public.

I would claim that it may be important that those voices be not confused with a representation. It may be that their rightful part would be to be a part of the expertise agency. For instance PTA procedures seem to me quite adequate to "test" the expertise, that is to create the setting for an open and controversial evaluation of the expert advices, concluding not in terms of a decision but in terms of an evaluation of the reliability of the grounds presented for the decision. Also, activist trajectories such as the ones which produced the possibility for S?bastien Denys’ presentation are true learning trajectories, identifying what was not taken into account in the framing of the issue, producing the kind of objections scientific experts so easily accept to ignore. In both cases, we should maybe think that "the public" is first and foremost to be thought of like a "presence", like the ones in the presence of which the debate must get unfolded. Here the example of the judiciary process, with "normal people" acting as a jury is quite relevant. The presence of the jury "obliges" since all protagonists know they are tested by people who are not part of their "conniving" habits. In a way they act as containment and "menstrues" in the tradition of chemistry : "common sense" here "forces" an active process of confrontation while in the "normal" setting, without a public, expert arguments are left to coexist without their contradictions being worked out, without an expert "impolitely" putting into light how his or her dear colleague ignores important aspects of the situation. Also, we know that those people deserve trust : Serge Gutwirth emphasized how a normal "someone", when endorsing the role of a member of a jury, usually "becomes" able to fulfil this role, as if transformed by the responsibility assigned to him or her.

I would claim that when neglected, public concerns find way to actualize themselves anyway, but they then show quite ugly faces, since disempowerment breeds resentment and hate. Furthermore, such a breeding process is not something to be thought of in terms of "lack of information", as if, when understanding the reasons for framing an issue in that or that way, people would accept and feel comfortable. Many authors have complained that we live in a society which is permanently transformed by technical innovations, but that "people" do not follow, go on thinking as if living in a stable world. I would claim that this is a concern which maybe should not address "people" but the way innovations are carried out.

If the term "GMO event" is relevant, it is because it confronted the very politics of innovation in our world, that is the principle of a freedom of "enterprise", whatever the consequences, with some constraints which must be justified by sound science based identified risks, regarding human health or damage for the environment. Those constraints were not obvious at the start, they had themselves to be conquered through political struggles, and they give today its scope and legitimacy to the precautionary principle. But the public concern, as manifested by empowering actualizing devices, exceeds this scope. The questions and objections seem to concern something which is still a closed box even if it has got a name : sustainable development. Objecting people do not accept centring around the only official theme of the debate : are there risks related to GMOs "as such", in their juridical, patented, laboratory definition of organisms containing a modified genome. They ask about social, economic, ecological consequences of the innovation. They insist "confusing" what has been carefully segregated as "risks", "economic consequences" (no to be discussed) or "agricultural problems" (to be solved). They ask what has been taken into account and how : that is the leading questions of sustainable development if it ever comes to actually become a matter of effective concern.

In all "sustainable development" talks, "information of the public" is always on the list of points that matter. We see, with the problems of the public servants, of those who "serve the public", as described by S?bastien Denys, that the so-called required information creates a very difficult situation when the questions, doubts and interests of the public address questions which have no official part in the decision. The "GMO event" shows rather clearly the limitations of the "risk" approach, or more precisely it implies that maybe the "mother" of all particular risk issues is our politics of innovation.

Thus, when thinking about "the public", it would be a fortunate transformation of habits that tales like the one Marc Mormont told us become "exemplary" tales, instead of the famous NIMBY tales that conclude that common interests need State arbitration because people remain desperately stuck with their own egotistic interest. In this case, people were addressed as thinking beings, given the time, means and opportunity to fully unfold the question, to contribute to the problem definition, even to produce their own safety demands against those of the engineers. In other words, the issue became a matter of common concern, connecting people in a new dynamic way. This does not really surprise me since it is the same kind of dynamics which turns members of scientific communities into empowered participants, becoming together much more remarkable than they would be in isolation.

Concluding these remarks, I would emphasize that the threads of our diverse works seem to become something like a tapestry. Many speculative unknown are written on this tapestry, but also the sense of possible transformations which may be the true connection power between us as researchers.