Alliage, Homepage

ALLIAGE

Culture-Science-Technique

Surely no journal promises less but delivers more than Alliage. The inside cover threatens a mixture of pretension and banality : "A review where imagination and reflection, research and creation confront one another and are conjugated". Even allowing for loss in translation, this neither reads smoothly nor, in fact, makes much sense. What follows seems oddly matched, a phrase déjà vu (or, rather, déjà lu) all too often : "Under the impact of science and technology, our lives are being transformed every day..." A confused, confusing but well-intentioned production, then? Something to toss to one side, with a sigh ? Another fashionable intellectual gesture from Paris ? A waste of good trees and good intentions ?

Actually, no. On the basis of its first nine issues, Alliage excels in every department. It is lively, unpredictable, and beautifully produced (in Nice, as it happens) with colour and graphics. Cartoons, paintings, poems, short stories, book and film reviews vie for space with photo-essays and in each issue around a dozen articles. Most issues offer a menu of three courses. After an occasional brief editorial, there appears an entr‚e consisting of position papers, manifestos or other kinds of provocation designed, one supposes, to release the intellectual taste-buds in preparation for the main course. This often consists of a theme treated from widely differing vantage points, for example, 'Eloge de la chimie' (issue 9), 'Einsteiniana' (issue 2), and in issue 3 several essays on science, culture and technology in the Third World. In 1991, Alliage printed a double issue on 'Man and Animal', an ambitious production covering such themes as animal experimentation, classification, aggression, science fiction creatures, animal rights, and with a series of haunting colour paintings produced for the journal by Jean-Paul Souvraz, a meditation on our perplexing emotional and rational relationships to animals, including ourselves.

Alliage means 'alloy', suggesting the chemical combination of different (metallic) elements. Pˆle-mˆle might have done as well, since the different styles and contents of the contributions to the journal do not blend at all ; indeed, I do not think they are supposed to do so. One of the exciting experiences offered by the journal is the juxtapositioning of different approaches meeting and, as it were, "conjugating", something encouraged by the mixture of genres as well as the journal's evident policy of including translations (from Stephen Jay Gould, Roald Hoffmann, Paul Feyerabend and Primo Levi, for example), historical documents (a juvenile letter of Einstein's, and J. B. S. Haldane writing on nonviolent biology) and reprinted material (Roland Barthes on Einstein's brain and, equally strange, Saint-Simon on a project to memorialise Newton). The net effect is both to break down barriers and to make connections. For readers to whom the "two cultures" suggests nothing more than a desiccated debate between faraway Cambridge primadons, this journal is blessed relief. Science, it proclaims, is culture, accessible to (indeed inviting) the same interrogations as poetry, politics and public life, ingredients of which make science what it is.

Alliage is not, clearly, a journal in the conventional sense. Nor is it "academic", again in the conventional sense, if by that term is meant disinterested and distant (that is, objective and value-free). As editor Levy-Leblond suggests, what gives meaning to a venture of this sort is the need for mediating links between the cultures of expertise and democracy. A just balance needs to be found between the claims of 'the experts' and 'the masses' : tilt the scales too much towards the first and one lurches into autocracy or some variant of ‚litism, while pressure in the other direction erodes just tolerance and respect for the necessary autonomy of intellectual production.

Somehow, somewhere, sometime, the contributors to the journal are saying, that balance can be achieved. Not through formal education (tried and failed) but through science shops, science centres, new ventures in the public media, through ballads, stories, myths, images, actions. For the historian of science, the science communicator, and anyone concerned with "the impact of science and technology", the issues of Alliage are a wonderful source of inspiration and guidance. There was a time when the French would look enviously across the Channel to England, home of New Scientist, which blended serious science journalism with science criticism. With the appearance of this journal, envious glances are no longer necessary, except perhaps towards the French Riviera.

a review by Michael Shortland, Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science,Univ. of Sydney, Australia
in Public Understanding of Science, vol. 1,p. 236, april 1992

a quarterly edited by Roselyne Chaumont & Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond,
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