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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
Bruno Latour is among the most important figures in contemporary philosophy and social science. His ethnographic studies have revolutionized our understanding of areas as diverse as science, law, politics and religion. To facilitate a more realistic understanding of the world, Latour has introduced a radically fresh philosophical terminology and a new approach to social science, 'Actor-Network Theory'. In seminal works such as Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour has outlined an alternative to the foundational categories of 'modern' western thought D particularly its distinction between society and nature D that has major consequences for our understanding of the ecological crisis and of the role of science in democratic societies. Latour's 'empirical philosophy' has evolved considerably over the past four decades. In this lucid and compelling book, Gerard de Vries provides one of the first overviews of Latour's work. He guides readers through Latour's main publications, from his early ethnographies to his more recent philosophical works, showing with considerable skill how Latour's ideas have developed. This book will be of great value to students and scholars attempting to come to terms with the immense challenge posed by Latour's thought. It will be of interest to those studying philosophy, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and almost all other branches of the social sciences and humanities.
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Seitenzahl: 448
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
Abbreviations
1: Empirical Philosophy
1.1 Making Paris visible
1.2 The path towards ‘empirical philosophy’
1.3 The power of addition
2: Science Studies
2.1 The ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’
2.2 An anthropologist visits a laboratory
2.3 Anatomy of a scientific paper
2.4 Realism in and about science
3: Science and Society
3.1 ‘The Pasteurization of France: War and Peace of Microbes’
3.2 ‘The Pasteurization of France: Irreductions’
3.3 Another turn after the social turn
3.4 The turn to ontology
4: Another Social Science
4.1 Deploying what makes up the social
4.2 Deploying how the social is stabilized
4.3 Shifting focus
5: A Philosophy for Our Time
5.1 ‘We Have Never Been Modern’
5.2 The modern Constitution
5.3 Relationism
5.4 Cosmopolitics
6: A Comparative Anthropology of the Moderns
6.1 A research protocol for a comparative anthropology
6.2 ‘Empirical philosophy’ redefined
6.3 Enquiring modes of existence
6.4 The modern experience: fifteen modes
6.5 Facing ‘Gaia’
References
Name Index
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Name Index
Subject Index
Pages
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Series page
Key Contemporary Thinkers
Lee Braver,
Heidegger
John Burgess,
Kripke
Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell,
Agamben
Jean-Pierre Couture,
Sloterdijk
Rosemary Cowan,
Cornel West
George Crowder,
Isaiah Berlin
Gareth Dale,
Karl Polanyi
Colin Davis,
Levinas
Oliver Davis,
Jacques Rancière
Gerard de Vries,
Bruno Latour
Reidar Andreas Due,
Deleuze
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir
Andrew Gamble,
Hayek
Neil Gascoigne,
Richard Rorty
Nigel Gibson,
Fanon
Graeme Gilloch,
Siegfried Kracauer
Graeme Gilloch,
Walter Benjamin
Phillip Hansen,
Hannah Arendt
Sean Homer,
Fredric Jameson
Christina Howells,
Derrida
Simon Jarvis,
Adorno
Rachel Jones,
Irigaray
Sarah Kay,
Žižek
S. K. Keltner,
Kristeva
Valerie Kennedy,
Edward Said
Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit,
Rawls
Moya Lloyd,
Judith Butler
James McGilvray,
Chomsky
, 2nd Edition
Lois McNay,
Foucault
Dermot Moran,
Edmund Husserl
Michael Moriarty,
Roland Barthes
Marie-Eve Morin,
Jean-Luc Nancy
Stephen Morton,
Gayatri Spivak
Timothy Murphy,
Antonio Negri
William Outhwaite,
Habermas
, 2nd Edition
Kari Palonen,
Quentin Skinner
Ed Pluth,
Badiou
John Preston,
Feyerabend
Chris Rojek,
Stuart Hall
Severin Schroeder,
Wittgenstein
Anthony Paul Smith,
Laruelle
Dennis Smith,
Zygmunt Bauman
Felix Stalder,
Manuel Castells
Georgia Warnke,
Gadamer
Jonathan Wolff,
Robert Nozick
Christopher Zurn,
Axel Honneth
Copyright page
Copyright © Gerard de Vries 2016
The right of Gerard de Vries to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5062-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5063-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vries, Gerard de, 1948-
Title: Bruno Latour / Gerard de Vries.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001169| ISBN 9780745650623 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745650630 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Latour, Bruno. | Science–Social aspects. | Science and civilization. | Science–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC Q175.46 .V75 2016 | DDC 303.48/3–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/201600116
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Preface
“When men cannot observe, they don't have ideas; they have obsessions,” V. S. Naipaul wrote. The modern philosophical tradition holds observation in high regard; nevertheless it is obsessed by a worldview that feeds off dualities – between humans and nonhumans, nature and society, facts and values, science and politics. Bruno Latour wants us to observe better, with a finer resolution. To become more attentive, to redescribe the world we live in, and to better understand our current predicament, he introduced ethnography and comparative anthropology as vital methods for philosophy. Latour is an ‘empirical philosopher’.
This introduction to his work follows Latour in his footsteps, both as an ethnographer and as a philosopher. The light tone of much of Latour's writing may easily conceal its profundity. Latour takes issue with much of what we take for granted as intuitively evident. By following Latour's moves closely and by providing some background from science studies, philosophy and sociology, to show to what extent and in what sense Latour's work stands out against the tradition, I hope to ease access to what Latour claims to be a richer vocabulary to account for who we are and what we value, that is, a better, fairer common sense.
Latour is a prolific writer on an amazingly varied set of topics, so some selection was inevitable. To introduce his empirical work, Latour's studies on science, law and religion will be discussed in detail; they led to substantial philosophical innovations. Latour's philosophy – his thoughts on science, on actor-network theory, cosmopolitics and his anthropology of the Moderns – is introduced roughly in the order in which they took shape. But this is not an intellectual biography; the historical and intellectual context in which Latour's thoughts evolved is only touched upon. That also holds for the reception of his work. This is an introduction to Latour's philosophy; not to science studies as a discipline, nor to the work of those who have followed Latour, used his ideas, or thought they did.
To write about a living author is an unquiet affair. With the advantage of hindsight it becomes apparent that Latour's work has been driven by a coherent heuristic. But those who followed his work were often puzzled when he took his thoughts to new levels and new domains or when he introduced conceptual innovations. We met in the early 1980s and stayed in contact ever since. Time and again he forced me to rethink his position, as well as my own.
I want to thank Bruno Latour and my Dutch friends and colleagues Huub Dijstelbloem, Rob Hagendijk, Hans Harbers, Josta de Hoog, Noortje Marres and Annemiek Nelis for their comments on the draft of this book. I'm also very grateful to John Naughton for his comments and for helping me out with the subtleties of the English grammar. As always, my gratitude to Pauline extends far beyond her comments on my writing.
Abbreviations
For full bibliographical details see the References.
1Empirical Philosophy
A truly bewildering Wunderkammer. The collection of Bruno Latour's publications brings an early-modern cabinet of curiosities to mind. Their subject matters range from laboratory life in Nobel Prize winner Roger Guillemin's Salk Institute (LL); the shared history of microbes, microbiologists and society (PF); the tragic fate of an innovative public transport system (AR); file handling and the passage of law at the French supreme court for administrative law, the Conseil d’État (ML); geopolitics in the epoch of the Anthropocene (FG); religion (REJ); economics (SPI); ethnopsychiatry (CM); modernity (NBM, AIME); to Paris (PVI), politics (PN, MTP) and philosophy of science (SA, PH). Pick up any of Latour's books and you will be guided again through a maze of surprising connections – from the technical details of a rotary motor to meetings at the Transportation Ministry and a photo-op with French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac; from Pasteur's laboratory in Paris to a farm in Pouilly-le-Fort; from the Conseil d’État in session to its mail room and to the file folders, stamps and paperclips in a secretary's cubicle; from a dialogue between lovers to Fra Angelico's fresco of the empty tomb in Florence; or from the Salk Institute's lab benches to the hectic travel schedule of its boss on his way to meet an endless array of colleagues, firms and high-level civil servants.
What's the point? Is there any order in this confusing, rambling, seemingly boundless list of subjects, actors, institutions and places? Who's interested in a High Court secretary's office paraphernalia or in the smile on the face of a politician sitting in a prototype of a public transport system? Why doesn't Latour stick to science and technology, the study of which brought him international fame; why did he fan out to other topics? And why doesn't he take the trouble to sort the various aspects of what he's talking about into neat categories, to leave technical details to scientists and engineers, legal matters to jurists, so that social scientists can focus on organizational matters, institutional relations and politics, after which philosophers can sit down to discuss foundational and methodological issues, the crumbs that fall from the other disciplines’ dinner tables?
To find our way in the world, to understand the modern world we live in, Latour claims we have to abandon the intuitions and explanatory ideals we have been trained to hold dear. The world does not present itself in pre-packed items that nicely fit into the pigeonholes of the established scientific disciplines. An education in law may have prepared lawyers for carefully reading texts and discussing legal subtleties, but if secretaries and court-clerks run out of file folders and paperclips, court documents will get messed up, chaos will emerge and before long the process of administering justice will have come to a full stop. So if we are interested in what lawyers are doing and how justice is administered, we better start taking an interest also in such seemingly trivial material aspects of legal practice as file folders and other office paraphernalia. Is it really possible to understand anything about societies without taking technology into account? Amazingly, the topic is not covered by sociology. Pick up any sociology textbook and you will see that sociologists are trained to study human groups, institutions, cultures and maybe the impact of technology on society, but not how technology makes up a substantial part of the fabric of society. So, Latour boldly claims, to become realistic about society, sociology has to be reformed. Can one truly understand modern science if one neglects the fact that a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will have spent long days not only at his lab, in hospitals and on academic conferences, but also in meeting rooms to discuss his work with patent lawyers, representatives of pharmaceutical firms and government officials? No. So we better start rewriting the usual stories about science. Why should one respect the established boundaries of scientific disciplines if scientists themselves keep trespassing them time and again? Engineers mix with politicians for work, not for pleasure; chemists, biologists and climate scientists discuss ecological problems with government representatives who probably have been educated as economists, lawyers, or as policy analysts. Only social theorists and philosophers tend to rigidly guard the borders of their fields.
As a consequence of his lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries, Latour's work is difficult to label. No wonder bookshops find it difficult to decide where to place his books on their shelves. In Paris, you will find most of them in the Social Sciences section; in Oxford and Cambridge they are stored under History and Philosophy of Science; in Amsterdam in the Philosophy corner. His papers are published in a wide variety of journals. To locate some of his other work, you may even have to travel to a museum – to the Karlsruhe Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) where Latour has curated exhibitions, or to the Centre Pompidou in Paris where he organized a series of conferences – or to visit his website www.bruno-latour.fr to find a ‘sociological web opera’ posted next to a video of a re-staged debate between Durkheim and Tarde, with Latour impersonating the latter. The fruits of Latour's labours are not easy to categorize.
But first impressions are deceptive. What may appear as a hotchpotch of projects that lacks disciplinary rigour is driven by a clear intent, namely to describe science, law, politics, religion and other key institutions of the modern world in a new way. Latour claims that several of the established conceptual distinctions used to demarcate modern institutions – e.g. nature versus society, and facts versus values – provide at best little guidance to understanding what goes on in science, law, politics and religion and more likely will lead us astray. To articulate the nature of the world we live in, to get a more realistic view, we need to redescribe these institutions, their values and the ways in which they differ from one another. In spite of the fact that most of Latour's academic papers have been published in social science journals, this intent is sufficient reason to conceive Latour primarily as a philosopher – although one of a distinctive kind.
Traditionally, philosophers have conceived their task as finding a point on solid ground that allows a perspective on the world as it is, that is, to see reality, essences, behind confusing appearances. Plato's allegory of the cave nicely captures the ambition. In contrast to the prisoners who have been chained in a cave for all their lives, who are able only to look forward and who take the shadows cast on the wall in front of them for reality, the philosopher is like the one who is freed from his fetters, who raises and turning around is confronted with the things outside the cave that cast the shadows on the wall, and who comes to understand that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, and that now he has turned to more real things he can see more truly (Plato Republic: 7.514).
Over time, philosophers have adopted a more modest attitude. The rise of the sciences has forced them to reconsider their role. As Foucault observed:
[f]or a long time one has known that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but to make visible precisely what is visible, that is to say, to make evident what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to us, that because of that we do not perceive it. Whereas the role of science is to reveal what we do not see, the role of philosophy is to let us see what we see.
(Foucault 1994: 3.540–541)
The sciences aim to inform us about what is hidden from view – e.g. what goes on in a distant star system, or in the brain of an Alzheimer patient – and to explain what we see in terms of underlying structures and processes. In contrast, philosophy tries to provide redescriptions of what is close to us: the world we live in and relate to, our social and moral intuitions, and our notions of who we are. So we may find Foucault (1979) opening our eyes for a much wider range of ways in which the conduct of a person is controlled in modern society, namely by pointing to new forms of discipline and punishment, that is, forms of power that have been around ever since about the early nineteenth century but that went unnoticed because we used to understand power only to refer to “every chance to carry through one's own will, even against resistance” (Weber 1972b [1922]: 28).
To single out redescription as the specific role for philosophy is certainly not an aberrant preference of some French philosophers alone. For example, Wittgenstein (1969 [1952]) also declared that “[w]e must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (PU §109). “We want to understand something that is already in plain view” (PU §89). The technique he suggested differs from Foucault's approach. For Wittgenstein, careful description of language is the preferred way to provide Übersichtlichkeit, a ‘perspicuous survey’ that helps to untie the knots in our understanding and to resolve philosophical perplexity. A perspicuous representation will “bring about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we ‘see the connections’.” “Hence,” he added, “the importance of finding connecting links” (Wittgenstein 1993: 132).
The similarity with Latour's intent is as remarkable as the difference. While at one point Wittgenstein (1998: 45e) wondered “if we use the ethnological approach, does that mean we are saying philosophy is ethnology?” – to further limit his attention to describing language games – Latour rose from his armchair to grab the bull by its horns. To do philosophy, to actually trace the connecting links and to learn to see what we see, Latour got engaged in empirical field studies, in ethnography.
1.1 Making Paris visible
Latour's intent and approach to philosophy may become clearer by discussing what at first sight is the most un-philosophical book he has ever published, Paris ville invisible (1998), co-authored with photographer Emilie Hermant. Because of its title and design – hundreds of photos of Parisian sites, with text interspersed, printed in a coffee table format – to acquire this book you may have to go to the travel section of a Parisian bookshop, where you may find it next to glossy books about romantic Paris and the Guide Michelin. But the rushed tourist who has picked up the book on his way home will likely be disappointed when he unwraps his souvenir. He has bought a treatise on philosophy and social theory. Discovering that the book was later turned into an interactive website will probably add to his chagrin.
In Paris ville invisible, the grandiose task of attaining Übersicht, of perspicuously surveying the world as a whole, is reduced to the more mundane one of capturing the whole of Paris at a glance. Where do we have to go to accomplish the task of perspicuously representing Paris? From which fetters do we have to free ourselves? Do we have to escape from the Earth, to get a view of the whole of Paris from a satellite? When we look at the image offered by Google Earth, we may indeed see ‘the whole of Paris’ at a glance. But except for the word ‘Paris’ being superimposed on the picture on our screen, we might easily have taken it to depict any other city. On the scale that captures Paris as a whole, the trained eye may spot the curves of the Seine, but very little else. So we may decide to take another tack, to go to Paris to join Latour and Hermant on their visit to the Samaritaine, the department store near Pont Neuf, which – before it was closed in 2005 for security reasons – proudly advertised itself with the slogan “You can find anything at the Samaritaine”. On the top floor of the old store was a panorama. One could see a lot of Paris from this spot. Binoculars were available for visitors and there was a huge circular table with engraved arrows pointing to Parisian landmarks drawn in perspective to help orientation. So is this the place where one might see the whole of Paris?
Unfortunately, no. As Hermant's photos show, smog from exhaust fumes veils the view. Moreover, the panorama fails to locate the Centre Pompidou and the impressive architecture of La Défense, and where the panorama promises tree-covered hills to be visible in the northeast, as Latour and Hermant note, one vaguely sees only endlessly more buildings. Set up in the 1930s, the panorama no longer corresponds to the city that spreads out before us. So, in spite of the available binoculars on the top-floor of the Samaritaine, Latour and Hermant suggest that to really see the Sacré Coeur, we had better get the metro to Montmartre.
On arrival at metro station Abbesses, however, another disappointment waits for us. Once we have left the station, we get lost in the maze of little streets in Montmartre. Where are we? The answer comes from the Michelin map of Paris that we have been carrying around. We look at the nearest road sign – it reads ‘Rue la Vieuville’ – and soon we have found the same words on the Michelin map. Now we know where we are. On the map, we have the entire eighteenth arrondisement at a glance. A minute later we know how to walk to the basilica. However, we also suddenly realize that by further unfolding the map, we can have the whole of Paris at a glance! Plato was wrong. To see the whole of Paris at a glance, we need to divert our attention away from the city, away from reality, and to look at the map. To take it all in at once, to see it at a glance, to see its structure, Paris first had to become small. What we set out to see – the whole of Paris – we have been carrying around all day in our pocket.
That is, provided a lot of work has already been done. We could find the place where we got lost only because the mapmakers at Michelin meticulously did their job and because the Paris municipality's road-maintenance service has taken the trouble to attach a nameplate to the wall. How did the road-maintenance service personnel know which plate should be attached to this particular wall? Obviously, they too had a map. Another official department, the Service Parcellaire, which keeps a detailed record of all cadastral data, has provided it. When we join Latour and Hermant to visit the Service Parcellaire at Boulevard Morland, we learn that it gets its information from the Service Technique de la Documentation Foncière, the Ordinance Survey Department, which hires small teams of surveyors to carefully measure the dense fabric of Paris and which gets the official names of streets, once they have been approved by the mayor of Paris, from the Service de la Nomenclature.
Our little excursion has taught us a profound philosophical lesson. Paris, reality, cannot be captured at a glance from a single, exclusive point, but the efforts of cartographers, technicians and civil servants, make it visible. Their coordinated efforts materialize the conditions that will allow documents, such as a map, to apply to the world, thus helping those concerned to find their way around to know where they are, and to see what they are seeing. If a philosopher sets out “to make visible precisely what is visible”, he has to trace the long cascade of activities and techniques that enable us to see what we see. Step by step they have transformed the terra incognita we have been plunged in – what in Paris ville invisible Latour calls the ‘plasma’ – into an ordered reality, while simultaneously delivering the means to represent, to map, its order. What was left for the mapmakers at Michelin to do was carefully to translate the official maps that resulted from the coordinated work of several municipal services into a format suitable for tourists to read and to carry around. Without these services, the Michelin mapmakers too would get lost.
Once we have digested this lesson, we will soon find out that there exist numerous ways of making Paris visible. There are multiple Parises within Paris. So let us join Latour and Hermant for another tour. At SAGEP the water supply is controlled. Computers survey the intake and consumption of fresh water. A lot of data need to be processed. But in spite of what the Latin word ‘data’ suggests, these data are not given, but need to be obtained. Sensors duly record the water flows, but to indicate where leakages may have occurred their readings need to be processed and compared to normal values. Because water will spend on average six hours in the system before being consumed, it is also necessary to anticipate demand. Statistics and weather reports help to predict upcoming consumption. SAGEP also knows that at the end of an European Cup football match, thousands of toilets will be flushed almost simultaneously. To control the water supply of a big city not only requires processing data from a lot of pipes, pumps and sluices, but also sociological insight into the habits of the population.
Similarly, traffic controllers, market researchers, statistical bureaux, all rely on techniques to obtain data and to translate them into images on a scale that fits the screen of a computer or a sheet of paper. All of them make Parisian lives possible and visible at the same time. Where would you find ‘the market’ if it wasn't made possible to compare the prices of commodities? Somebody has to collect and process them for you, to make visible what ‘the market’ is doing. Even local supermarkets contribute to this task by carefully arranging products on their shelves and by making the price and the content of products visible so that clients can make comparisons before loading their shopping carts. There is no market without devices that make what's on the market visible.
Okay, one may think, this may perhaps apply to social reality and technology, but surely not to the natural world? It takes little effort to realize that technologies like the water supply system are constructed. And because social facts require human agreement and institutions for their existence, the same goes for acknowledging that the building blocks of social reality are constructed. But surely, natural facts are ‘brute facts’ that require no human institution for their existence. Of course, to state a brute fact requires the institution of language, but the fact stated needs to be distinguished from the statement of it (Searle 1995: 2). One should not confuse the map with the territory. In contrast to social facts, brute, natural facts – say the fact that the sun is 150 million kilometres from the Earth – existed long before any human being appeared on Earth. It would be strange to think that in this case human construction work would be involved.
Alas, it's more complicated. Join Latour and Hermant for yet another trip, this time to the biology department of the École de Physique et Chimie de Paris. Here, Dr Audinat has managed to make visible the activity of a single neuron in a rat's brain. ‘Molecular and Physiological Diversity of Cortical Nonpyramidal Cells’, the paper in the Journal of Neuroscience in which he and seven colleagues have published their results (Cauli et al. 1997), carefully documents all the steps that were necessary to do the job. On one of its pages, a photo showing a neuron – a ‘layer V FS cell’ – is juxtaposed with a graph of its electric potential and a photograph of an electrophoresis gel that bears the marks of molecules synthesized by this neuron. We see the anatomy, the electric potential and the molecular biochemistry of a neuron at a glance – that is, if we read the explanation of the pictures published on the bottom of the page and in the body of the article.
To produce these pictures has required a lot of preparatory work. A rat had to be decapitated, its brain extracted; fine slices of the brain had to be cut with a microtome; these slices had to be framed before being put under an infrared microscope and searching through all of them, a neuron had to be identified. Once this had been achieved, microelectrodes were brought into contact with the cell to obtain the electric potential and to read its electric activity from an oscilloscope. At the end of the recording, the content of the cell was aspirated in a micropipette, transferred to another laboratory, and prepared for introduction into a PCR-machine to obtain the molecular biochemistry of the neurotransmitters. At this point Audinat and his colleagues have obtained their data – which, again, were not ‘given’, but obviously required a lot of work and skill to be produced. They have finally succeeded in making the activity of a rat's neuron visible. Does their paper refer to the activity of a neuron in a rat's brain? Do the results truly represent events in a rat's brain? Yes, after carefully reading the article the readers of the Journal of Neuroscience will be convinced they do – as have been the referees who had to evaluate the paper before the journal's editor decided to publish a second version, revised on the basis of the referees’ comments. So, did Audinat and his colleagues state ‘brute’ facts? To accept that they did, we have to ignore all the steps they had to take to produce the facts they state in their paper – some quite brutal indeed, like decapitating animals. Obviously, to do so they had to rely on much more than language alone. They had to carefully prepare rat-neurons to make their activity visible and representable. To understand what it means ‘to refer to’ the activity of a neuron, ‘to represent’ the facts, we have to follow all the links that the group has established in their research – just as we have to understand all the work that the various services had to perform before the Michelin map of Paris became a reliable guide for finding one's way through Paris, and to grasp all the efforts that had to be undertaken before SAGEP knows the current status of the water supply in the complicated system of pipes and sluices it oversees.
In Paris ville invisible we encounter Latour in action. Visiting an amazingly varied collection of sites, he interviews the people he encounters on his way, always curious to learn the minute details of their work, the way their work is linked to that of others, and the ways they handle, compare, and translate the information they receive in the form of documents, instrument readings, graphs, or in whatever shape it happens to arrive in their offices, into a form suitable to their own purposes. He carefully listens to their accounts of what is going on, the technical and organizational problems they have to cope with, and the alternatives that may have existed but which they did choose not to follow. He is engaged in ethnographic fieldwork, in empirical, anthropological research – not of some remote tribe on some Pacific island, but of the people working at SAGEP, a biochemistry laboratory in Paris or in California, the French High Court for administrative law, or at any other site that might have attracted his curiosity.
While scribbling observations in his unreadable handwriting in little notebooks, to be transposed later to other notebooks, to finally find their way into the case studies that populate his work, Latour simultaneously answers some of the key questions of philosophy. From which point can we see the true structure of reality? Wrong, badly framed question. There is no such point, but nevertheless we may study how reality is made visible. How do you know that the pictures that are eventually produced correspond to reality? Again, wrong, badly framed question. The pictures that are produced do not correspond to reality, but to other pictures. If for whatever reason a problem arises, Michelin will first check its maps against the ones produced by the Service Parcellaire. If the Michelin mapmakers find no fault, they will inform this service, which again will first check its own records. If the Service Parcellaire finds its records to be in order, it will inform the Service Technique de la Documentation Foncière, which ultimately may decide to send out a fresh team of geodesians to re-measure the site and to draw a new map, which will be processed all the way up to the mapmakers at Michelin, who will dutifully issue a new edition of their map. But aren't we in this way confusing the map with the territory? Again wrong question. It suggests that we are dealing only with an epistemological issue, that is an issue about the knowledge supposedly contained in a map or a research paper. The real issue lies on the other side of the equation. Epistemologists tend to think much too naively about ‘reality’. They conceive it as something given, out-there, as a territory waiting to be discovered and to be mapped. However, as we have just seen, it takes a whole array of preparatory actions to make reality visible, measurable and to interact with it. To observe the activity of neurons in rats’ brains, Dr Audinat didn't passively watch an animal, but decapitated a rat to meticulously prepare slices of its brain to make a neuron's activity visible. What we're primarily dealing with when trying to understand what scientists – or mapmakers for that matter – are involved in, are first of all ontological questions, that is to say questions about what, and in what way, something has to be, before it can properly be called ‘objective’, ‘visible reality’. Before a scientific paper, a document, a map can refer to something out-there, to reality, reality has to be transformed from a terra incognita, from a ‘plasma’, to a territory that is made visible. To ‘passively’ observe facts one has first to ‘actively’ invest in reality (Fleck 1979 [1935]). But philosophers of science surely must have been aware that setting up a scientific enquiry involves a lot of work, haven't they? Indeed. Of course, they knew this. But once they started to writing up their accounts of what makes scientific knowledge great, they seem to have forgotten this. How come? – We'll get to that later.
This is what Latour is up to: while filling up his little notebooks, he is replacing epistemological questions that have dominated most of the philosophical tradition by ontological ones. And in contrast to most philosophers of the past who engaged their inquiries in an armchair, to answer his philosophical questions Latour goes out to do ethnographical research. For want of a better name, we may call him an ‘empirical philosopher’. Neglect his empirical work and you will completely lose his philosophy; disregard the philosophical intent and you will be bogged down in a bewildering set of disparate books and papers.
1.2 The path towards ‘empirical philosophy’
It took quite some time before Latour decided to come out as a philosopher.
Born in 1947 in Beaune (France), in a family that has owned Maison Louis Latour since 1789, world-famous growers and merchants of the finest Burgundy wines, Bruno Latour left the future of the wine-business to his brother to attend Jesuit school and the University of Dijon for a master’s degree. In 1972 he gained a First in the agrégation de philosophie (a national exam). In Ivory Coast, while engaging in ‘cooperation’, a sort of French Peace Corps, an alternative available at the time for military service, he completed his thèse de troisième siècle (PhD) Exégèse et Ontologie (1975, l’Université de Tours). It includes a close reading of Clio, dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne, an abstruse work of the poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Péguy that provided the material for ‘Les raisons profondes du style répétitif de Péguy’, a paper he gave to the Péguy centennial conference in 1973. It was published in 1977 as ‘Pourquoi Péguy se répète-t-il? Péguy est-il illisible?’ – ‘Why does Péguy repeat himself? Is Péguy unreadable?’ – his first academic paper. In 1987 he obtained the habilitation à la direction des recherches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, a second PhD.
Ivory Coast got Latour on the road to ethnography. Invited to contribute to a study on the problems encountered when replacing white executives with local, black Ivory Coast managers, Latour decided to study how ‘competence’ was conceived in the industrial milieus of Abidjan. Based on extensive, two to three hours interviews with about 130 persons, assisted by Amina Shabou, Latour identified the discourses about competence of four distinct groups: European executives and lower middle-class whites; black Ivory Coast executives; directors of big multinational corporations; and black workers. Speaking in terms of ‘race’, the ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ of the native population, or in terms of features like ‘courage’, ‘talent’, and ‘bad faith’, the first two groups were found to offer accounts of the ‘African mind’ to explain why the black population was still not up to managing modern industrial enterprises. These accounts, however, suffered from one problem, Latour observed. They provided explanations for a fact that was far from evident. Although there was an abundance of anecdotes (conveyed in the same discourse), statistical data about native incompetence were non-existent. And when interviewing directors of multinational firms, Latour found this group to conceive competence primarily as a matter of proper recruitment, training and management. Instead of referring to the ‘African mind’ of the local population, the higher levels of the Abidjan business community talked about ‘organization charts’, ‘proper stimulation’ and ‘promotions’. So, if there was incompetence among Ivory Coast workers at all, with the proper means, perhaps it could be overcome. Latour therefore turned his attention to education. Interviewing white teachers, he noted again complaints about the features of the ‘African mind’ that prevented African pupils from meeting ‘French levels of competence’. For example, he found teachers at the Lycée Technique in Abidjan reporting their pupils to be unable to read technical drawings as representing three-dimensional objects, obviously a serious deficiency for future technicians. When he interviewed the pupils and started looking into school practices, however, Latour found a much simpler explanation. The school system (an exact copy of the French system) introduced engineering before students had done any practical work on engines. Since most of the pupils had never seen or handled an engine before, it was not surprising that the interpretation of technical drawings presented them with quite a puzzle. The cause of the problems the students had with reading technical drawings was not their ‘African mind’, but the lack of appropriate connections required to interpret such drawings. Exporting the French school system to Africa without exporting the many links to engines that French pupils have established even before entering school, made boys in Abidjan ‘incompetent’.
Latour had made a small but significant move. What had started as a rather dull sociological enquiry, and halfway through might have turned into a 1970s style critique of ideology and critical social science, suddenly had become quite another kind of enterprise. Competence is not a state of mind that precedes successful action, Latour concluded in Les idéologies de la compétence en milieu industriel à Abidjan, the report in which he and Shabou (1974) describe their findings. Competence is not some hidden, given mental entity. One is competent if one controls a system – a machine, an organization, a flow of documents – from beginning to end, that is, if one has the information and the resources ready to adapt and to act capably, that is: if one knows what to do next. Competence should be analysed as set of links, as a network of connections that provides a key for what to do next, for further action.
In Ivory Coast, Latour's empirical research programme took off. However, the crucial move that led him to conclude that ‘competence’ should not be conceived in mental and cultural terms but in terms of a set of links, Latour had already anticipated in philosophical terms. In 1972, before leaving France for Ivory Coast, Latour had taught for a short time at a lycée in Gray, on the borders of Franche-Comté and Burgundy. As he was to recount in The Pasteurization of France (1988), one day at the end of autumn, on his way from Dijon to Gray, he was forced to stop, “brought to my senses after an overdose of reductionism”. “I […] simply repeated to myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’ ” (PF: 162–3). In Ivory Coast, he applied this ‘irreductionist’ principle. Instead of reducing the (supposed) lack of competence of blacks workers to their ‘African mind’, Latour redescribed what competence is in terms of links, alliances. In Ivory Coast, he started to do philosophy with empirical means.
After having defended his PhD thesis at the University of Tours in 1975, Latour continued on the empirical path. The endocrinologist Roger Guillemin had generously allowed Latour to spend two years (1975–77) at the Salk Institute, San Diego, to study the competences of scientists in a biochemistry laboratory. The lead question of the empirical work Latour would do in California came straight out of his work in Africa: what would happen if the field methods used to study Ivory Coast pupils and workers were applied to first-rate scientists? Laboratory Life – The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, the book based on his fieldwork in San Diego, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, was published in 1979.
Latour had met Woolgar in 1976 at the first conference the Society for the Social Study of Science organized and had invited him to come to visit the Salk Institute. Woolgar opened up a new resource for Latour, ethnomethodology, the study of the accounts people give of their lives to make sense of their actions and relations and to organize their everyday life. Developed by Garfinkel (1984 [1967]), the approach basically consists in asking people a very simple question – ‘what are you doing?’ – and – much more difficult – to systematically refrain from offering descriptions and explanations of actions in terms of the schemes taught in social theory classes. Ethnomethodology shifts the attention of social science away from questions about explanations, that is, questions about why something happens, to ontological ones, that is, questions about what is going on. Latour discovered that he had been practising ethnomethodology for years. This was the approach he had used when interviewing schoolboys and black workers in Abidjan, and this was the question that – not being versed in science – he was raising when meeting the scientists at the Salk laboratory to make sense of what was going on.
Laboratory Life was widely received as a publication in the emerging discipline of ‘social studies of science’. Latour was included in the ranks of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr-Cetina, John Law, Mike Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Steven Shapin and a dozen other Young Turks who had decided to turn their backs on established logical-empiricist philosophy of science to take ‘a social turn’, that is, to study the sciences empirically, by sociological and ethnographical methods. Although there had been sociologists who had studied science as an institution before, it had taken Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – originally published in 1962, but more explicitly in its second, enlarged edition (Kuhn 1970) – to provide the basis for the conception of the social character of scientific knowledge. ‘Social studies of science’ set out to fill in the details by providing an avalanche of sociological studies of scientific controversies and ethnographies of modern laboratories. The way controversies were closed and scientific facts became established was explained not by referring to the available evidence and methodological rules, but in terms of social causes and processes.
Few realized at that time that Latour was on a different trajectory than most of his colleagues in science studies, who self-consciously framed themselves as sociologists, and who were proud not to be philosophers. In fact, Latour doesn't seem to have been aware of the difference himself. It would take several years before he started to deny explicitly that, like the others, he was out to provide sociological explanations for scientific knowledge and technological artefacts. Perhaps Les Microbes, published with a philosophy-heavy second part, Irréductions, in 1984, should have rung some bells, but it was almost completely neglected until The Pasteurization of France, its English translation, became available in 1988. To most non-Francophones, the 1986 postscript to the second edition of Laboratory Life first indicated the upcoming differences. In sections with titles such as ‘How Radical is Radical?’, ‘The Place of Philosophy’, and ‘The Demise of the ‘Social’, Latour and Woolgar boldly set out why they had omitted the term ‘social’ from the new edition's subtitle. They pointed out that by explaining the construction of scientific facts in terms of social causes or processes, social study of science – while proclaiming the need to demystify realist epistemology among natural scientists – had un-reflexively adopted a realist attitude for its own work and had naively misunderstood the nature of ethnography (LL2: 273–286). In heated exchanges in the 1990s first with Collins and Yearley (Collins and Yearley 1992; Callon and Latour 1992; De Vries 1995) and later with Bloor (Bloor 1999a; 1999b; Latour 1999a), the gap between Latour and the social studies of science community widened.
To mark the contrast, Latour decided to adopt ‘actor-network theory’, a name suggested by Michel Callon and John Law, as the battle cry for his approach to follow and to describe the work that goes into making reality – what is – visible. To bluntly call his work ‘philosophy’ was apparently still a bridge too far. In later years he would deeply regret this decision since it utterly misnamed what the approach is up to: “There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!” (Latour 1999b). Eventually, however, he decided to accept the name because it is “so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept” (RAS: 9).
In 1982, Latour had joined economist and sociologist of technology Michel Callon at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, one of France's top engineering schools, for what would become a fruitful co-operation lasting almost 25 years. With no administrative duties and a relatively low teaching load – one class of engineering students on Fridays and a biweekly seminar for CSI's PhD students – Latour could devote his full energies to writing about scientific practice, technology, and eventually a much wider variety of subjects. His rapidly growing international fame in science studies led to visiting professorships at the University of California at San Diego, Harvard's History of Science department, and the London School of Economics, to several honorary doctorates, and to invitations to teach in universities from Melbourne to São Paulo, all over Europe and in the US. In the 1990s, Latour started to apply the approach and the lessons learned in science studies to other subjects: art, law, politics, religion, and the ecological problems the world faces. In 1991, arguing that we fundamentally misunderstand the modern condition we live in, he published a radical and to many readers puzzling philosophical essay, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes – We have never been modern (NBM).
For a long time, Latour was more famous outside France than in Paris. Being at odds both with main currents in French philosophy and with French social science, and his work for a long time being almost exclusively devoted to science and technology – a subject most French intellectuals take little interest in – it took quite some time before the excellence of his work was recognized in France. Only a few heterodox French scholars – including Boltanski, Thévenot, and Descola – incorporated some of Latour's ideas in their own work. This gradually changed in the early 2000s. In 2006, Latour left the École Nationale Supérieures des Mines to become professor at Sciences Po, a prestigious (private) political and social science university in Paris, where he was elected vice-president of research a few months later. A weeklong meeting at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2007, on the occasion of Latour's sixtieth birthday, may mark his full acceptance in France as a philosopher. In rooms lined with photos of earlier Cerisy-meetings with towering figures of continental philosophy – including Heidegger, Sartre, Bachelard, and Foucault – about 100 people gathered to discuss with Latour the draft of a new work. The topic: ‘exercises in empirical metaphysics’. The ambition: to summarize the enquiry Latour had been pursuing for decades and to answer the question positively of what characterizes the current situation in the West, that is, to answer the question that baffled many readers of We Have Never Been Modern: if we are ‘not modern’, what makes the civilization that brought us – among other things – the institutions of science, modern law and democracy stand out? Published in French in 2012 and in English a year later (AIME), the book was well received in France.
In 2013, Latour was awarded the prestigious Holberg memorial prize for his ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and for challenging modernity's fundamental concepts. As the Holberg Prize academic committee noted, by then “[h]is influence has been felt internationally and well beyond the social study of science, in history, art history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, theology, literature and legal studies”.
1.3 The power of addition
With hindsight, we may find that Latour did not come completely unprepared to Ivory Coast to enter on the course that would lead him to do philosophy with ethnographic means and to get engaged in ‘exercises in empirical metaphysics’.
In one of his rare autobiographical writings, Latour (2010a) recounts that at the University of Dijon he had the good luck of befriending André Malet, a former Catholic priest who had become a university professor and Protestant pastor. Under Malet's guidance, Latour discovered biblical exegesis. Malet had just finished the French translation of Rudolf Bultmann's Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, originally published in 1921, but still one of the standard texts of New Testament exegesis.
To enable modern readers to appreciate the Gospel, Bultmann, a Lutherian theologian, had decided to de-mystify the New Testament by close reading, using a method he called ‘form-criticism’. Form-criticism aims to identify secondary additions to determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying, or a parable. By eliminating step-by-step the elements and language later interlocutors had added, Bultmann eventually identified a limited number of sentences in Aramaic that could be genuinely attributed to a certain ‘Joshua of Nazareth’, the historical Jesus. By eliminating the later mythical additions, Bultmann hoped to open up the Gospel to modern, rationalized readers, wary of abstruse elements.
