The Condition of Felicity of a Blind Instrument

This paper deals with an historical and ethnographic case : the operation of field laboratories in the sugar industry and their use of an instrument to measure a vegetable - the sugar beet. An optical instrument – the polariscope - gives voice to sugar beets in order to settle agreements on the vegetable's industrial definition and financial value. The polariscope gained its strange authority through a historical and technical capacity for mediation : a mediation between sugar beet growers and sugar manufacturers (and their social interests), but especially a mediation between these social actors and the vegetable itself.
I focus on the idea that, in fact, this instrument is “blind” and describe the sociological “exchanges of properties” that take place between human and non-human actors in an industrial, public, and low-tech setting. My study shows that this is a challenging and alternative way - far from scientific laboratories - by which knowledge and coordination are produced.