timelets

“Cognitive powers are necessarily limited. They do not simply overwhelm the world around them. Rather, intelligence consists in finding ways to operate immanently, within the world, and in concert with other entities in the world.
Intelligence works by enlisting and forming alliances with other intelligences – as Bruno Latour might put it.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”

2.1.10 Since nothing is inherent in anything else, the dialectic is a fairy tale. Contradictions are negotiated like the rest. They are built, not given.

--- Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France, 1993.

...the simplicity of the perceptual judgment on which the setting up of the proof culminated is what made the difference and carried conviction. Pasteur was not stinting in the laboratory and outside in concentrating interest and discussion on a few extremely simple perceptual contrasts: ab­ sence/presence; before/after; living/dead; pure/impure.
...
even if the Pasteurians developed a biology in the laboratory, they did not practice a labo­ratory biology. They did not leave to others, as apparently happened in England, the job of using or applying their results, contenting themselves with "pure science."

--- BL, TPoF, 1993.

In line with the expectations and demands of the period, the prize would go to whoever explained not contagion but variation in con­tagiousness in terms of environmental circumstances.
...
...since their problem was to reconcile contagions and morbid spontaneity. As soon as Pasteur, using anthrax, reproduced in the laboratory the influence of the environment on the virulence of a microbe, all the power of the hygienist movement shifted and became belief in the laboratory of the Rue d'Ulm.

--- Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France, 1993.