Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini

already participate in political debates. Objects often function as expressions of matters of concern, encapsulating aspects of an issue to make them accessible to a broader public” (DiSalvo et al., 2014). The design of technical solutions can thus profit from taking sociotechnical crash tests seriously by crafting designs that are deliberately unfinished and open to multiple uses and appropriations. In their analysis of the Zimbabwe bush pump, Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol have, for example, shown how what they call a “fluid technology” can better adapt to multiple sociotechnical contexts and thus constitute a more robust, because less developed, solution (de Laet & Mol, 2000). Similarly, Giorgio De Michelis (2003) has argued that the traditional Sardinian shepherd’s knife allows for a variety of different uses, from wood carving to sheep surgery, with an elegant open-ended design that does not require the multiplication of blades and tools found, for example, in the modern Swiss army knives.

       Mapping for democratic inquiry

      Besides being useful to those who study technoscientific arrangements and design them, controversy mapping can also help those who, willingly or not, are affected by their consequences. As we just saw, controversies are hard to handle through the established procedures for managing matters of science and technology. They are especially impossible to manage through the so-called “linear model of expertise” (Weingart, 1999; Pielke, 2007; Beck, 2011). According to this model, sociotechnical problems should be handled by separating science and politics. First, policymakers decide which questions are worth studying and financing. Then, scientists and engineers agree on the answers in full autonomy and regardless of their social consequences. Finally, based on the answers, politicians deliberate to make an informed decision. Such a linear arrangement is not only unrealistic because it requires an impossible separation between facts and values (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998; Durant, 2016), but also paralyzing because it defers any political decision until scientific consensus is reached. This is clearly not an option in sociotechnical controversies that, by definition, are precisely the situations in which urgent deliberation is needed even if (and sometimes because) expert agreement is still lacking (Callon et al., 2009).

      Many of the controversies troubling our collective life demand urgent action in the absence of clear and unambiguous expert advice. In dealing with biodiversity loss, pandemic outbreaks, wealth inequalities, or ethnic and gender discrimination, we just don’t have the time to wait for a scientific consensus, which may in some cases never come. As noted by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, “decisions have to be made before the scientific dust has settled, because the pace of politics is faster than the pace of scientific consensus formation” (2002). This is precisely why the “precautionary principle” was introduced by the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: to allow action notwithstanding scientific controversies.

      Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation (principle #15).

Abandoning the dream of a science-based politics, however, raises the question of who should decide when experts fail to (or delay in) reach(ing) a consensus. One option is to refer the conflicts to political authority. Where science fails, politics could provide resolution. From Machiavelli to Schmitt, the imposition of power is the hallmark of the so-called “realist” school of political science (Korab-Karpowicz, 2018). This is especially the case for “states of exception,” as Carl Schmitt calls them, situations of extraordinary tension where ordinary procedures for reaching consensus prove ineffective (Agamben, 2005). Recently, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has provided an example of such a situation, with political leaders all over the world invoking a “war against an invisible enemy” to justify extraordinary measures taken with little or no deliberation. This solution, however, can be a slippery slope and lead to authoritarian policies.

      But if neither might nor right can take care of our controversies, who or what will? The answer, in short, is that we will have to resolve our controversies ourselves. In a democracy it is the privilege and burden of citizens to serve as the court of last resort for matters of acute public concern. To use the words of Walter Lippmann in the The Phantom Public:

      It is controversies of this kind, the hardest controversies to disentangle, that the public is called in to judge. Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions. (Lippmann, 1927, p. 121)

      “Unfitness” is the keyword here. Lippmann is a pragmatist and does not for a moment believe that the public could gather and process all the information necessary to have informed opinions and thus make knowledgeable decisions on complicated technoscientific questions:

      The public does not know in most crises what specifically is the truth or the justice of the case, and men are not agreed on what is beautiful and good … if it had seriously to crusade for justice in every issue it touches, the public would have to be dealing with all situations at the time. That is impossible. (pp. 56, 57)

      This is why the public is only the court of “last resort.” Whenever possible, issues should be composed by the actors directly involved. If the actors succeed in reaching a compromise, then their disagreements can be happily ignored by the rest of the world. If they fail, then institutions should step in and facilitate a conciliation. After all, maintaining peace and order is one of the functions of public officers and administrators. However, some controversies are so thorny (and some institutions so inefficient), that no administrative solution succeeds in settling them. It is in these cases that the public, “in all its unfitness,” is called in to arbitrate (with no warranty that its arbitration will be particularly just or enlightened).

Too often such an argument is read as a case against public participation (for example in Schudson, 2008). It is not. It is a heartfelt acknowledgement of the paradox of democracy and of the unfair but necessary burden that it puts on its citizens. The public is a “phantom,” a cohort of men and women called in to judge not because they are in the best position to do so, but because everyone else has failed. Experts cannot agree, decision makers cannot decide, administrations are jammed by conflict. So, the public is dragged in to arbitrate. But the public cannot devote much time to each controversy. Our collective debates are too many and too complicated. It would be illusory to hope that citizens could get to the bottom of all of them. The best the public can do is align its forces behind those actors that appear less partisan and more capable of solving the crises, for “the public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece” (Lippmann, 1927, p. 55).

      Called in to judge on the most intricate affairs without the necessary time or resources to become experts in them, citizens need brief but accurate cues to detect “the hero and the villain” of the play. According to Lippmann, providing such cues is the ultimate mission of journalism, a mission that, according to Bruno Latour, is shared by controversy mapping.

      Can we organize our public life in order to facilitate, through simple and robust signals, the detection of those who, engaged in the inevitable controversies, are the most able to justify their positions or, conversely those who demand that we rely on their arbitrary judgement. If these signals exist, can we multiply them, make them more prominent, learn about them and learn how to maintain them? We have no choice: if these signals are deleted, fade or disappear, there will be no more public life. Democracy will be impossible. The very meaning of politics will disappear for good. (Latour, 2008b, pp. 21–22, our translation)

      The third reason for mapping controversies is, then, to help their publics to take sides, not by proposing simple solutions, but by patiently unfolding the multitude of issues and voices that articulate them. We will discuss different political agendas for cartographic interventions in chapter 9; for the moment we will just note that mapmakers can assume different postures. According to authors such as Callon (1999a), Callon et al. (2009) and Latour (2003, 2010b), a good map should facilitate