Sociology of ignorance

Long-forgotten figures on the media, union and sociological agendas, occupational illnesses and work accidents have experienced a clear revival of both institutional and scientific interest in recent years. The work of Jean-Noël Jouzel Invisible toxicants. Sociology of a forgotten health issue participates in this rediscovery by being in line with the work recently carried out on asbestos (Henry, 2007) or on silicosis (Rosental, 2009).

Borrowing from the sociology of public problems, the sociology of risks and science studies, the investigation traces the transatlantic career of the problem of glycol ethers, molecules “ ubiquitous » present, since the 1930s, in a particularly wide range of products (from water-based paints to cleaning products or perfumes) and suspected of causing, in the employees who handle them, serious alterations of the reproductive functions (miscarriages, sterility, intrauterine malformations, testicular cancers).

The originality of this work is primarily due to the specificities of the problem it deals with. The question of health at work is in fact posed in an unexpected region of the industrial space, since the “ crime scene » here are the clean rooms of semiconductor companies which, likeIBMdisplay all the trappings of an industry “ own “. It is also an imported problem, born in France at the very moment it is dying out in the United States, a migration of which the author meticulously describes the smugglers, the disjointed temporalities and the discrepancies specific to translation operations. .

Finally, and above all, far from the media glare of the asbestos affair, glycol ethers present themselves in the guise of a problem “ low noise “, “ which discreetly interferes in public space, not causing a health scandal, much less a political crisis » (p. 224), an eclipse problem whose public career is made of ebbs and flows until finally aborting. Jean-Noël Jouzel’s work thus embodies the stimulating turn taken by the sociology of the construction of public health problems: by leaving its preferred areas, which have long been scandal, affair and the noise of media coverage. , it now offers a sociology of silence, ignorance, misrecognition and concealment. Because as the author points out: “ Contrary to common sense opinion, ignorance is not the opposite of knowledge, nor is it a simple absence of knowledge. She is not a empty » original from which the acquisition of knowledge would allow us to extract ourselves » (p. 227). The argument of the investigation consisting more precisely in showing that “ ignorance of the links between health and environment is not only a natural fact, it is also a social fact » (p. 12).

Occupational diseases: a “ low noise problem »

This column “ scientific-political » of glycol ethers follows a historical and explanatory framework that is now well established (Henry, 2007 ; Rosenthal, 2009). Glycol ethers indeed come up against the obstacles which traditionally oppose the publicization of professional risks in France. The first concerns the legal construction of the latter. While granting victims of work automatic compensation, the historic compromise established by the law of 1898 on industrial accidents and extended in 1919 to occupational diseases in return established the principle of “ no-fault liability » which protects employers from legal challenges and which contributes to placing work pathologies in the order of inevitability. The second obstacle is union atony on workplace health issues. French prevention policies are in fact based on a “ tradition of negotiated management » (chapter 4), a joint system between employers and employees which inclines unions to foreclose their demands in this area and to consider occupational diseases “ as a risk to be managed and compensated rather than as a threat to be eradicated » and therefore to denounce publicly.

The publicity windows through which glycol ethers are likely to rush in therefore turn out to be narrow and the problem progresses through circuitous routes. The analogy with the asbestos scandal is particularly illuminating here. THE “ case » of glycol ethers indeed borrows its temporalities (a first publicity in 1994, then a peak of media coverage in the early 2000s). It also relies in part on the same actors (a specialized law firm, the FNATHthe Mutualité Française and some trade unionists from the CFDT and the CGT grouped together in a Glycol Ethers Collective). Its media reception is mainly based on the same type of rhetorical strategies: the first consisting of broadening the spectrum of potential victims from workers to consumers ; the second based on the effective selection of victims “ innocent » (children victims of their parents’ professional exposures rather than the employees themselves). However, glycol ethers will not experience the fortune encountered by the asbestos affair. Anxious to preserve the professional dimension of the problem and to enclose its treatment in the arena of joint negotiation, the entrepreneurs of this mobilization work to undermine its visibility, they struggle to fully endorse the format of “ public health scandal » and prefer to give up the work of recruiting patients into a victims’ defense association (chapter 6) which could have allowed glycol ethers to escape permanently from the structural anonymity to which occupational illnesses are usually reduced.

The instruments of (mis)knowledge

This sociology of ignorance has the immense advantage of not being reduced to a sociology of concealment (and industrial strategies for concealing risk). This is evidenced by the particularly fruitful analysis offered by the author of the role played by techniques in making public health problems invisible. A questioning based on the problem of “ government by instruments » (Lascoumes, Le Galès, 2005) and since then extended to another area, that of the fight against agricultural pesticides (French Journal of Political Science, 2013, vol. 63). By tracing the genealogy of the tests from which the toxicity of industrial production is measured, Jean-Noël Jouzel shows how the devil nestles in the details of the technique rather than in the intentional maneuvers of industrial bosses. Indeed, technical tools encapsulate inseparably scientific, economic and political arbitrations to the point of making them unobservable and thereby indisputable. The reader is thus invited to follow over several decades the twists and turns of a discipline – toxicology – and an instrument – ​​toxicity tests. in vivo – which are becoming institutionalized in the United States to the point of becoming a “ government science » and a “ regulatory knowledge » which today forms the basis of prevention policies in terms of occupational health. On observation in situ working conditions, favored by the first industrial hygienists to assess the dangerousness of the molecules handled, have gradually been replaced by remote experimentation, carried out in vivo, on laboratory rats rather than workers. The exposure limit values ​​imposed by the administration to protect employees are thus calculated from an artificial and unreal situation – brief, high-intensity animal exposure to a single toxicant. However, the instrument at the same time throws a “ veil of ignorance » on the ordinary of the most frequent occupational exposures, i.e. those which occur at low doses, over time and in contact with multiple toxicants. Lack of knowledge of the effects of glycol ethers or agricultural pesticides is therefore produced “ not only despite the instruments of knowledge in the hands of prevention institutions, but also, in part, because of them » (RFSP, 2013, p. 32).

Socially invisible victims… who remain sociologically invisible ?

Supported by a remarkable work of bibliographic import, by a transatlantic comparative perspective and by a historical depth of field, Jean-Noël Jouzel’s work testifies to a field of sociological investigation – the construction of public health problems – which , after having generated significant discovery effects, now seems to have reached maturity and is enjoying the benefits of cumulativeness. However, the work shares some of its blind spots with this line of analysis. As the author points out, this literature focuses rather on the symbolic and discursive dimensions of the construction of public health problems, on the framing operations, the mobilization of knowledge, the manufacturing “ of causal stories » effective, etc. However, this genealogy of the problem of glycol ethers remains primarily a study of “ rhetorical work which conditions the public existence of these molecules and their victims » (Sociology of work, 2009). Therefore, even if Jean-Noël Jouzel indicates that mobilizations around health risks “ do not operate in a social vacuum » (p.14) and that he announces in his introduction an analysis of “ mechanisms that put (the victims) moving », the work remains quite discreet on the rooting of these victim collectives in localized professional and union histories, on the biographical bifurcations and the militant conversions which nourish them, on the conditions of the transition to collective action of individuals struck by the disease. The problem of glycol ethers therefore has a career, the author of which carefully describes the folds and folds. But the actors in this story – whether the victims mobilized, but also the lawyers specializing in toxic torts or trade unionists who have become experts in workplace risks – are, however, deprived of it. They remain in the background, like silhouettes of the story that the reader is never completely able to grasp. The author is therefore completely convincing when he details the mechanisms that make the victims of glycol ethers socially invisible. But, at the end of the work, it is not certain that the latter completely cease to be sociologically.