Understanding the Warning Process Through the Lens of Practice: Emancipation as a Condition of Action–Some Lessons from France - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 228

These examples clearly show the strategies adopted by some actors, because they
need to 'simplify' the situation in order to take action. However, these strategies
entail ignoring or denying the proliferation of entities in the AE. It is an effective
way of simplifying things, but not very satisfactory from the perspective of action,
because it entails an arbitrary reduction of the AE. For its part, emancipation is
based on more subtle ways of managing this proliferation of entities. These
solutions are no longer about 'ignoring' part of reality, but about temporarily and
calculatedly ceasing to consider certain entities in the AE and/or prioritising them
in order to avoid being swamped.

12.4.2 An Ideal-Typical Strategy: The Detour

The detour strategy refl ects practices observed amongst stakeholders in the warning
process. It was during work on this that the notion of emancipation emerged. As
mentioned, the process of taking into account the AEs relies on a relationship with
the entities that implies contact and interpretation. In the detour strategy, an inter-
mediary is introduced into the relationship with an entity to mediate, 'manage'
this relationship, in several ways. The intermediary resembles a relational system,
because it can be used to integrate one or more entities into the AE, while dele-
gating all or part of the process of taking into account.
This intermediary takes three main forms: the pseudopod, the decoder and the
transistor (a comparison table is provided on p. 26 ). They correspond to incremental
degrees of complexity and integration: the pseudopod is the simplest level of inter-
mediary, the decoder is a pseudopod equipped with translation skills and the tran-
sistor is implicitly a pseudopod-decoder that also performs a 'fi ltering' function.
We will see that this gradient correlates with an increase in the 'emancipatory
power' of the detour strategy.
Certain aspects of these practices are well known, but rarely taken in their totality
and in the context of the action process. As to their emancipatory dimension, it is
generally ignored.

12.4.2.1 The Pseudopod-Intermediary

Pseudopod: biol., projection of the cytoplasm of certain cells, that serves in locomotion and
phagocytosis.

It is the phagocytosis function that interests us here, since the pseudopod-
intermediary makes it possible to take account of otherwise inaccessible entities,
and thereby to widen an actor's action environment.
The pseudopod is the most common form of intermediary, primarily requiring one
quality in the intermediary: to be copresent with certain entities in another actor's