Derrida dreams about Le Shuttle

Anyone commuting between Paris and London on the Eurostar cannot fail to be surprised by the difference between the speedy rectilinear travel through France and the meandering leisurely trip through beautiful Kent. Conversely, any foreigner from Europe, that is from the Continent, especially if they have to work in London, cannot fail to wonder how it is that everyone on the Continent screams at Jörg Haider's fits of nationalism, yet one has to take quietly the violent rhetoric of the British tabloid press, which can be more racist and xenophobic than even Slobodan Milosevic. Anglophile French people question why, if Great Britain is so central to the European project, it continues to see everything continental as remote, something to be dismissed and even as heinous? Hence the interest of a book about the "Chunnel" that sets itself the task of exploring the mental representations and geopolitics of an unspoiled virginal Britain invaded by hordes of exotic Europeans - together with their terrorists, rabid foxes, written constitution and euro banknotes, not to forget their carriage-loads of deconstructionist philosophers.

This otherwise sympathetic book unfortunately suffers from a flaw that is honestly revealed on the first page: "I was excited about taking the Tunnel train," writes the anthropologist Eve Darian-Smith, "or Eurostar (earlier Le Shuttle), as it is officially known." Thus the author, who claims a unique vantage point on the divisive nature of the bridging because of her Australian background and her academic position in the United States, has entirely missed the fact that "Le Shuttle" does survive and that it carries lorries and cars in parallel with the passenger-carrying Eurostar. After so many years of fieldwork (a word that she criticises as ridiculously odd), she has completely missed the "little detail" of a huge circulation of cars and trucks - no less than half of the freight through Dover - whose economic impact, geopolitical consequences and emotional character are entirely different from the passenger circulation she takes as her only topic, not to mention the delicious "frenglish" name of this fixed link.

It is not very surprising that such gigantic features of the enterprise are omitted from the book, since the author pertains to those schools of anthropology and social science for which technology remains fully invisible, in fact as safely hidden and invisible as the tunnel under the sea. "The Channel Tunnel is both a monument and a spectacle," Darian-Smith writes. A monument, mind you, not a technology whose practical existence could have connected people and things in different ways; and a spectacle, the occasion of a son et lumière that she nicely presents by using press coverages, advertisements and selections of interviews.

Fine, you say, then let us forget about engineering and learning anything of the tunnel itself and the transportation industry, the trains and the physical connections, and let us see what the author has to say about Britain in Europe before and after the dividing bridge had been settled upon. Well, here is where the second flaw of the book appears, and this time less innocently. The author is intrigued by Kentish localism, and the book contains many amusing and slightly quaint stories about Kent: its gardens, police, old customs, legal practices and the community-spirited work that failed to delay the building of the tunnel. All of which could have been interesting; after all, in anthropology we study and read about much quainter people than Kentish fake farmers. A comparative ethnography of the French neighbours, in not-so-hostile Pas de Calais, would have been enlightening, too - but since these "Froggies" do not speak English, there is not one line about them in the entire book.

The problem is that from a study of Kent the book turns into a demonstration of the ability of the author to master cultural studies, using the authority of Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and Co (I was wrong - there are French in the story): that is, the "shifting layers of meaning" that cover what fieldwork (abandoned by the author as an obsolete methodology) should instead have uncovered. The reason those of us who practise fieldwork like it so much is because such lines of inquiry reveal the unique character of the topic at hand, be it a transportation system, a tiny community, a public demonstration, that no amount of theory can account for.

Not so in cultural studies: people, landscape and artefacts are seen here only as "monument and spectacle" for the author to remind the reader of the deep thoughts that some other authority has developed about "the gaze","the discipline", "the perspective" or "the post-colonial predicament". Following a network on the ground is a much harder task than swimming through shifting layers of meaning. The result is that we are constantly distracted from Kentish idiosyncratic politics by having to bow to the icons (a much-cited word) of those honoured by the "discipline" of cultural studies.

This is a shame, because the ways in which the Kent people largely reinvented themselves on the occasion of this new work of engineering and geopolitics would have provided a great opportunity to learn more generally how the less directly exposed Britons confronted their perceptions of Europe, without bothering with the obsessions of the tabloids' love-hate relationship. But this would have meant having to undertake fieldwork on the tunnel itself, and probably crossing the Chunnel to meet the French. Sitting comfortably in the Eurostar train and seeing through the windows trucks queuing to board Le Shuttle, I continue to wonder which anthropologist will explain to me why the British, as the most European of us all and with London the true capital of Europe, are stuck in a space-time warp floating somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, somewhere in the middle of the Napoleonic wars.

Bruno Latour is professor, centre for the sociology of innovation, Ecoles des Mines, Paris, France.