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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Certain great friendships have left their mark in the annals of philosophy - and, without a doubt, the friendship of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers is among them. Although they wrote very few texts together, their intellectual companionship lasted for over thirty years, and their respective work can be fully understood only when the many interconnections of their thought are brought to the fore. Latour and Stengers occupy the same starting place, one which remains at the heart of their work: scientific practice, which is the pride of modernity. Why do we Moderns define ourselves as those who know, while others are condemned to be only believers? This question led Latour and Stengers to the same fundamental question: how to understand and live in what Latour calls "the new climatic regime" and what Stengers calls "catastrophic times"? Philippe Pignarre's aim is not to try to sort out which ideas belong to whom but rather to interweave their thought even more. In so doing, he sheds new light on the origins and development of their work at the same time as he documents an exceptional intellectual adventure between two of the leading thinkers of our age.
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Seitenzahl: 371
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Notes
In Homage to Bruno Latour
Introduction: Speech Impediments
Notes
1 To De-Epistemologize . . .
Notes
2 . . . Or Disamalgamate the Sciences
Notes
3 A Brief Exercise in Empirical Philosophy
Notes
4 Sociology or Politics?
Notes
5 The
Factish
Gods
Notes
6 The Parliament of Things: Doing Ecology
Notes
7 Identifying Modes of Existence, Thinking with Whitehead
Notes
8 The Intrusion of Gaia
Notes
9 Conclusion: Composing a Common World . . . During the Meltdown
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For François Gèze, who immediately grasped the importance of the work of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers.
Latour–Stengers
An Entangled Flight
Philippe Pignarre
Translated by Stephen Muecke
polity
Copyright Page
First published in French as Latour–Stengers. Un double vol enchevêtré. © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2021
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Excerpt from The Pasteurization of France by Bruno Latour © Harvard University Press, 1993. Used by permission. All rights reserved
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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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: 978-1-5095-5550-5 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5551-2 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945712
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Epigraph
Commentary is never faithful. Either there is repetition, which is not commentary, or there is commentary, which is said differently. In other words, there is translation and betrayal.1
Bruno Latour
Noticing that a situation is entangled calls for disentangling, trying to follow the different threads and separating them . . . whereas entangling means lending it more density, greater depth.2
Isabelle Stengers
Notes
1
Bruno Latour,
The Pasteurization of France
, trans. Alan Sheridan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 (1984), p. 178.
2
Isabelle Stengers,
Activer les possibles
,
dialogue avec Frédérique Dolphijn
, Noville-sur-Méhaigne: Éditions Esperluètte, 2018, p. 126.
In Homage to Bruno Latour
He loved the world so much . . .
If there is one constant in Bruno Latour’s work – which his publishers, La Découverte and Polity, have had the privilege of publishing – it is his love for the world taken as a whole. He neglected nothing, abandoned nothing, eradicated nothing. It was in this sense that he was happy to continue the legacy of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
He worked his way through what he called “modes of existence” (and he identified fifteen of them), delving into them with extensive fieldwork. He loved science. He loved technology (to the point of speaking in the title of one of his books of “the love of technology”) at a time when it was fashionable to dismiss it. His brother recently explained to me that when he visited the family vineyard in Beaune, he was interested above all in the smallest details of the wine-making process. His great synthetic tome, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, is also a book that teaches us to love these ways of making the world, despite the way that each often falls into the temptation of mastery.
He shows us how some modes are fragile, threatened with disappearance, as is the case for religion or for politics (“poor politics,” as he put it). Both religion and politics are now threatened by something more powerful than themselves: science (but also morality!).
He always wanted to give each mode of existence its dignity, which meant recognizing its own “felicity conditions,” its modesty – which, in the end, is its only grandeur. The worst sin is for the mind to confuse modes of existence by reducing them with the help of grand concepts such as the rational/irrational opposition. To judge one mode of existence with the criteria of another is to desiccate the world, to reduce it, to empty it to the point of being unlivable.
That’s why he liked activists, as those who learn, and distrusted militants, who know already and only want to convince others. He had therefore launched workshops to collectively explore the world “in which we live” and the world “from which we live,” a way of participating in the environmental movement in its irreducible diversity. To those who reproached him for not appearing to be sufficiently anti-capitalist, he replied that a new class struggle has begun.
Bruno loved “causes,” and made Isabelle Stengers’ formula his own: “Let the causes cause” [causer, to cause, but also ‘ramble on’]. The paths of these two philosophers are inseparable. You have to read the one to better understand the other. Nor can we understand Bruno Latour without taking an interest in his other fellow thinkers, those of the Centre de Sociologie de l’École des Mines and in particular Michel Callon and Antoine Hennion, but also Philippe Descola, Bruno Karsenti, Tobie Nathan, Donna Haraway, Nastassja Martin, and Nikolaj Schultz.
I learned something from Isabelle Stengers that was very useful when I was with Bruno: if you say you like something – a book, a film, a work of art – you should not stop there. You have to give your reasons. What effect did it have on you, what did you learn or feel? A demanding, sometimes daunting, exercise. If your appreciation wasn’t up to the mark, was too offhand or superficial, without attachment, both would soon stop listening to you.
Bruno liked to remind us of the importance of what we are attached to. When you come from a world where people swear by emancipation, detachment, and criticism, it is a way of questioning our way of thinking about the world and of doing politics. Why be pushed to talk about deconstruction when all you want to do is give a “good” description of how something achieves its existence?
When I entered the world of research – in pharmaceuticals – before becoming a publisher, I was trying to understand the work of scientists in order to communicate it. At first, I turned to epistemology, but the more I read those philosophers, the less I understood what research work was! That’s when Isabelle Stengers urged me to read Laboratory Life. Nothing was ever the same again!
Bruno liked the bonds of loyalty. He remained faithful to La Découverte and was one of the reasons why the series “Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond” [Those Who Stop Thought from Turning in Circles] became part of the French publisher’s list. He appreciated and always acknowledged the work of Pascale Iltis, Delphine Ribouchon, Caroline Robert (who was careful to produce her books in her own special way), and, of course, François Gèze, who was the first to publish him when he was unknown (and had to be translated from English!). Stéphanie Chevrier, our current manager, was amazed by him.
We saw Bruno enter the last phase of his life, when his country finally recognized him as one of those thinkers “who is the envy of the world” while, with incredible courage, he faced the terrible ordeal of his illness. Our thoughts go out to those who accompanied him throughout, and in particular to his children and his wife, Chantal.
He leaves us with one question: how will we carry on his legacy?
Philippe Pignarre
Introduction: Speech Impediments
I conceived of this book as a kind of patchwork composed of many quotations, which might give the reader a somewhat unstable feeling. But I thought that engineering it in this particular manner was the best way to come to terms with the comings and goings between the works of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, a particular mode of “weaving”1 which made me adopt as a title Gilles Deleuze’s admirable phrase, quoted by Stengers, “an entangled double flight.”2 It will thus run a zigzag course. Citing them both at length meant I chose to dramatize in a certain way because simply summarizing their different texts would not have worked. I wanted the reader to be touched by their actual modes of expression, being as close as possible to them, while my undertaking of an overly pedagogical task of exegesis would deprive us of their brilliant flashes of thoughts often grasped in full flight.
In the first place, I took this work on as an editor who loves the authors he is publishing. After all, what is an editor, in the end, if not the first mouthpiece for the texts he has chosen to uphold? I hope this will generate the desire to delve into the respective works of Latour and Stengers that I hold so dear, and of which I have no hesitation in saying that they have changed in the deepest way my manner of being in the world. I wanted to sharpen your appetite. Reading Latour’s oeuvre by regularly confronting it with Stengers’ propositions – was this the right attitude for plunging into such a witch’s cauldron? Each of you will make up your own mind. Latour and Stengers have descendants in common who know their works well and will put them to good use. But nonetheless I think I was the only one able to sit down to this task and who had the time, “profiting” from the isolations of 2020 and 2021.3
The procedure I follow here is not entirely symmetrical. I have not tried to paint a picture of how Stengers’ thought was built up, from her meeting with Ilya Prigogine to reactivating the work of Alfred North Whitehead, passing by way of the intellectual encounters she had with Léon Chertok or Tobie Nathan. Attempting a parallel task with the oeuvre of Bruno Latour would be mission impossible. So I voluntarily chose to concentrate on the latter, privileging as much as possible the points at which it crosses, collides, or aligns itself with Stengers, who quite often quickly seizes on Latour’s propositions but without ever leaving them intact. Rather, she makes them twist in a way that one could call political. I pay particular attention to those moments where Stengers puts in her own words what she has learned (or taken) from Latour and also to the ways in which she emphasizes both their importance and her divergences. As for Latour, when he comes to meet Stengers, it is often through a shift in his arguments – his own ones; so that has to be inscribed in the movement of his ideas without suddenly bursting in. As it happens, in the course of time, the references to Stengers multiply in his writings to the point where he dedicates Politiques de la nature to her in 1999.4 (Stengers had dedicated L’Invention des sciences modernes to him six years earlier, “For Félix Guattari and Bruno Latour, in memory of a meeting that did not take place.”5) This is how Stengers speaks of her relation to Latour: “[His] subtle and demanding reading [of the first draft of her book, Au temps des catastrophes] is written into the process, which for over twenty years is witness to the fact that agreements among sometimes divergent paths are made thanks to the divergence and not in spite of it.”6 There are also notable occasions when one of them says how and why they are borrowing a proposition from the other or how it is to be understood.
If this book follows a chronological path, it is nonetheless replete with references which are often not in that order. It seemed to me useful to put in formulations that were able to throw light on propositions made earlier, but which one of the authors had fully explained, often with different words, only at a later stage. And again, in that sense, this book is “woven.”
One of the difficulties of this task comes from the differences between their respective styles. Like two magnets, Latour and Stengers are attracted and fascinated by each other’s conceptual propositions, but they are quite distinct in their ways of writing. In order to be convincing, Latour multiplies his pedagogical exercises and is happy to be repetitive, to demonstrate again and again, in order to make them more accessible. He creates characters (like the young anthropologist who questions him in Cogitamus, and who turns up again in his Enquête sur les modes d’existence).7 He multiplies conceptual inventions and even shock formulas (Irreduction, Moderns, Great Divide, black boxes, factishes, Parliament of Things, Double Click, to de-economize . . .), examples, explanations in boxes, diagrams, paintings, drawings, extracts from comics, photos, and theatrical set designs. The disorder in Latour’s multiple interventions and ways of intervening is only apparent. He often says that, because of the irruption of Gaia, one has to use everything in one’s arsenal, for how else can we find forms modified to the representation of this new cosmos that is nonetheless ours?
For her part, Stengers is quick on the uptake as she multiplies her propositions (requirements and obligations, speculative thought in the strong sense, the cosmopolitical, diplomats, slowing down, recalcitrance, modes of abstraction, induction . . .). One should not miss a single sentence in her argumentation because the occasion to catch up later will not occur. One has to understand straightaway, and so be prepared to slow down as one reads, or go back over her text. Reading her books is not a frolic in the woods. You have to read the chapters in order. Her thought is tight, precise, and moves forwards implacably. But do not think that Stengers writes without hesitations. If you have access to the different versions that have emerged successively from her pen, you know that that is far from the case. Latour has turned himself into a sociologist, ethnographer, historian, philosopher, but always a researcher. As for Stengers, she is a philosopher, irremediably a philosopher, including in the two fictional works she has written, the first on Freud and the second on Newton and Leibniz.8
Yet there is something they do have in common, something a little obscured, or at least difficult to grasp because it relates to a philosophical question that will turn out to be of prime importance. Anyone who has attended a public occasion on which Stengers is speaking will have been struck by her hesitations, with her sentences interrupted by a “How should I put this?” which may not just be anecdotal. What kind of Latouro-Stengerian interpretation could one give of this? One would be mistaken, of course, to imagine the hesitation has any kind of psychological basis when in fact it is a matter of the problem to be solved, with the proposition itself in the process of bursting forth, asserting itself in the murmur of the world, something that is difficult to express with precision. It is indeed the need to “depersonalize the experience of the work-in-process, that is, get rid of anything that gives it a psychological or social narrative.”9 Everything that needs to be said is still virtual. This is much more like the hesitation of a mountaineer on a difficult alpine climb, looking for the best grip on a vertical wall. How does one get a grip? Adopting the point of view of the climber is not enough because there is the mountain as well – or the audience, for our case at hand. But it is perhaps the example of the surfer that is the most eloquent:
with each wave, surfers take the risk of catching it or letting it go; they have no illusions of being in control. What is at risk is their possibility of keeping on, of sliding into the wave, at the critical point where only a precise and sensitive insertion of one motion into the other can make them earn the respect of the breaking wave.10
Didier Debaise will put it like this: “You can’t just decide that you have a soul, an idea, or a feeling: they grab you from the outside.”11
Stengers’ “How should I put this?” is the equivalent of Latour’s paintings, graphics, and diagrams that punctuate his books. He has offered a very nice formulation to describe these instances of “How should I put this?” as speech impediments that designate “not speech itself but the difficulties one has in speaking and the devices one needs for the articulation of the common world – to avoid taking logocentric words . . . as facile expressions of meanings that would not need any particular mediation to manifest themselves transparently.”12 He goes on to elaborate that “the connotations of the word [articulation] cover the range of meanings that I am attempting to bring together, meanings that no longer stress the distinction between the world and what is said about it, but rather the ways in which the world is loaded into discourse.”13 He will open his Rejoicing book in the same way.
Rejoicing – or the torments of religious speech: that is what he [Latour] wants to talk about, that is what he can’t actually seem to talk about: it is as though the cat has got his tongue; as though words were impediments; as though it was impossible to articulate; he can’t actually seem to share what, for so long, he has held so dear to his heart . . . he can only stutter . . .14
As it happens, Stengers also turned “the idea that flees if one tries to make it explicit”15 into a philosophical question in her Thinking with Whitehead book:
The point it neither to describe nor to explain but to produce a set of constraints that impose on thought a regime of reciprocal presupposition. A “leap of the imagination” may respond to these categories, but it is a vertical leap, conferring on words the capacity to evoke, not to designate. It is not that process “transcends” language, but what is appropriate to it is the component of stammering in language, the “Well, what I mean is . . .” or the “How should I say . . .” in which what hesitates is not a set of potential statements but the very wording of the words, together with the “I” who “means” [veut dire].16
This picks up on William James’s “undecidable question: am I touched [ému] because the world is touching [émouvant] or does the world seem to me to be touching because I am touched?”17 It happens that something emerges as an argument proceeds, wending its way and interrupting “the automatic interpretation that makes me attribute either to an external cause or to a reason of mine the fact that an experience has passed . . .”;18 it happens that a proposition is difficult to formulate because it does not relate to some solitary cerebral exercise on the part of the speaker but presupposes a leap of the imagination in order to be formulated with all the hesitations, the risks of betrayal, that are part of its other engagement, this time with an audience that has to be up to the task of listening, sharing the hesitations, sensing that this work-in-progress might fail. “Even the wise Plotinus, reaching towards Intellect, must have a discursive practice based on the experience that he has, which is fragmented, problematic, discordant, an approach in which resides the tension towards the unity of creating/producing/discovering, together with the intense awareness that he could be mistaken.”19 We shall see that here lies one of the many facets of what Latour will quickly come to call the Great Divide, cropping up in all his work.
For Latour, a “musical metaphor” is a good way to come to terms with this situation: one can hear a melody that remains inaudible for those not involved – “a melody to which we become better and better attuned.” It is not a question of saying we have a “mind zooming toward a fixed – but inaccessible – target. It is the fact that ‘occurs,’ that emerges, and that, so to speak, offers you a (partially) new mind.”20
Stengers will even propose the term “induction” (in a different sense from the traditional meaning), a word she learned with Chertok, and which refers to the relation between the hypnotizer (or hypnotist) and the hypnotized, to qualify a fairly unique creative situation: when the idea “flees if one tries to make it explicit,” when the “enigma puts the creator to the question,” when the creators are “creatures of their question,” 21 when propositions “possess individuals far more than individuals possess them,”22 when she speaks of the experience “of those who know that what they seem to be the authors of is in fact what obligates them.”23
Because “hypnotizers are well aware that they are not the ones who have given the order [for example, asking the hypnotized person to raise their arm]. If they have a role, it is rather that of indicating a path, or authorizing an experience.”24 She will return to this with a more technical account in 2015:
The achievement of saying to oneself “I understand” is not an act of thought. The “understanding”, as much as the “I” who has understood, both owe their existence to a path of instauration, a response appearing in the wake of “something to be understood,” a double and correlative grasp by the form of both the agent of the instauration and the thing instaured.25
This is also what this book is trying to do by “tracking” Latour and Stengers.26 It attempts what Stengers calls a “speculative gesture,” rather than a boring pedagogical exercise.27 Making a speculative gesture means deploying the experience in all its dimensions, including with virtual ones that accompany it without becoming apparent.
Stengers herself makes the link between Whitehead and another philosopher, Étienne Souriau, whom we shall see will also be all-important for Latour as the two philosophers contribute, each in his own way, to break the spell cast by “the subject facing the object,” epistemological abstraction. Here is how Stengers is citing Souriau in Thinking with Whitehead:
I insist on this idea that as long as the work is in the workshop, the work is in danger. At each moment, each one of the artist’s actions, or rather from each of the artist’s actions, it may live or die. The agile choreography of an improviser, noticing and resolving in the same instant the problems raised for him by this hurried advance of the work . . . [or] the works of the composer or the writer at their table . . . all must ceaselessly answer, in a slow or rapid progression, the questions of the sphinx – guess, or you will be devoured. But it is the work that flourishes or disappears, it is it that progresses or is devoured.28
Latour puts it like this:
To say, for example, that a fact is “constructed” is inevitably (and they paid me good money to know this) to designate the knowing subject as the origin of the vector, as in the image of God the potter. But the opposite move, of saying of a work of art that it results from an instauration, is to get oneself ready to see the potter as the one who welcomes, gathers, prepares, explores, and invents the form of the work, just as one discovers or “invents” a treasure.29
I should immediately warn the reader, who may get a surprise, or even be disturbed, when they encounter this somewhat awkward development: it is no minor matter and we shall see it emerge once again in chapter 7 of this book under the heading of the “bifurcation of nature,” when we shall also meet Souriau again, and Whitehead, of course. In a book published in 2020, Réactiver le sens commun: Lecture de Whitehead en temps de débâcle, Stengers will introduce the idea of the “middle voice,” contrasting with, on the one hand, the active voice where the syntactic subject designates the entity acting, and the passive voice where the syntactic subject is the one undergoing the action.30 She writes:
Bruno Latour, however, contributed somewhat to the resuscitation of the semantic pertinence of the middle voice by proposing that we hear it in instances in which we hesitate over the attribution of an action . . . Instead of associating the middle voice with a general acknowledgment that we are not the sovereign authors of our actions, Latour proposes to associate it with concern and care over our manners of being attached.31
This is clearly one way of thinking that Latour and Stengers share.32
But to return to the question of their different styles, is it unimportant? It would be too simple to say yes. In one of his first writings, on Péguy, Latour made a point of emphasizing what can be learned from style. On Péguy’s notable tendency for repetition, he wrote: ‘This simple impression stops us from seeing this aspect of his style as a problem of form . . . for the moment we have to consider Péguy’s repetitive style as the basic problem of his work . . . formal effects need to gather up the movement that basic content can only capture as a betrayal.”33 A seeming paradox: things must be touched on lightly in order to better grasp them, an idea appearing again in the Inquiry into the Modes of Existence book, first published in French in 2012, which brings to a close numerous inquiries, but which also marks, as we shall see, the definitive refusal of any discourse of critique that purports to unmask, to show what there is behind things.34 What is true for Péguy may also be true for our two authors. We shall see the importance of reprise, starting over again, being reactivated at the moment when Latour and Stengers reread and jointly present Souriau, or when Stengers writes Thinking with Whitehead.
Another difficulty comes from the fact that they don’t make a point of writing for each other. They have plenty of other interlocutors (in particular, Algirdas Greimas, Harold Garfinkel, and Françoise Bastide in Latour’s earlier works, but also Philippe Descola or Michel Callon right through his career). Stengers likes to recount that her “first native habitat was the novels of Alexandre Dumas”:
When I say that I can sometimes hear the echo of Dumas in what I write, it is perhaps because I liked his powerful characters. All his characters are strong, and he liked them all for their strength and their clashes. That is what I want to do when I write. I want my protagonists to speak with all their force, even if it is a dark, ominous force. . . . And I’m hoping that that will nourish readers’ thinking forces.35
And then, Latour and Stengers don’t do their politics in the same way. They are not looking for the same allies. Hence Latour has often exasperated the Marxists (at least in France, where for convenience they make him out to be a relativist), while what Stengers has to say has apparently been more acceptable to them. We shall see that it is a bit more complicated than that. But, in both cases, the Marxists have often taken the precaution of avoiding them and not reading them, despising them rather than confronting them. Stengers has increased her contacts with activists of all stripes, from electromagnetic hypersensitives to those ripping up GM plants, passing by way of the Zadists as well. She had a translation done into French of the neo-pagan witch Starhawk, having announced her deep-felt regard for her. She leapt to the defense of Houria Bouteldja, one of the founders of the Indigènes de la République party. Latour, more often, has kept away from direct engagement.
Latour and Stengers share a good deal of common philosophical background: first, the American pragmatism of William James and John Dewey,36 then Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, or, closer to us, Donna Haraway. They also began their work on the sciences in the company of Michel Serres, even if they parted ways with him later.
But another thing that their two oeuvres have in common is their amazing continuity. Readers with a tendency to begin with the latest works off the shelf would be convinced of this by delving into Irreductions, first published by Latour in 1984 as an appendix to his book on Pasteur. Or, Stengers’ The Invention of Modern Science, first published in French in 1993. They don’t look a day older. Of course, the words used are changed, refined, renewed. Words are worn out and get older, sometimes because others take them away to say something else with them, rob them of their effect, or even destroy them. But such work also allows for precision to be applied, or for finding new, more adequate, formulations, even to the point of inventing terms or borrowing them from another language. If the words change, it is also because of a difficulty that Latour, rather pessimistically, brings to the fore: “People have ideas on the sciences that Voltaire had in the eighteenth century, and they have not budged one centimeter.”37 Latour humorously noted, as early as 1999:
The science wars, from this standpoint, are not lacking in a certain grandeur. I would join the camp of the “Sokalists” [allusion to the Sokal and Bricmont affair, two scientists behind a hoax designed to provoke a violent denunciation of the human sciences getting involved in the experimental sciences] right away if I heard someone calmly proclaim that the sciences are one “system of beliefs” among others, a “social construction” without any particular validity, an interplay of political interests in which the strongest wins (positions that are usually attributed to me by people who have not read my work!). “That means war!” as Isabelle Stengers reminds us.38
And Stengers confirms:
They still always point out to him [Latour] that if he maintains that neither reason nor nature has the last word in this production [of scientific objects], then the objects are nothing more than relative, like everything else, to arbitrary opinion and blind political relations. A rock-solid protestation, obstinate and deaf to any argument. It is well and truly an order word that Latour has come up against.39
This book could also have been entitled “Les causes de Bruno Latour et Isabelle Stengers,” relating to the double meaning of the word cause (what makes us think and what must be left to happen): “It is simply that the notion of cause is not sufficient in itself, not any more than the notion of explanation. One could say that each cause poses the question of how, here and now, it is going to cause.”40 Many years later, opening a Cerisy colloquium, Stengers adds: “Thinking is not ‘thinking on’ or ‘thinking about’ but ‘because of’ [à cause].”41
If this little book wins its bet, it will be that the reader will have understood that there are not two Latours, the first a sociologist of the sciences (being more or less relativist), and a second who suddenly got interested in ecology (heaping praise on scientific institutions and in particular the IPCC, the intergovernmental body of the United Nations responsible for knowledge on climate change), this latter interest having nothing much to do with the former. We shall see that it is thanks to his work on the sciences that he was able to think ecology afresh, to completely redefine it. And he understood how important Stengers’ dogged work was, for while it regularly connected with the Latourian ideas, it kept unfailingly to its original philosophical path. It is an opportunity to work with both, following what Donna Haraway has called their “companionable friction.”42
I have obviously not written this book without trepidation. Will I be up to it? Am I not presumptuous? And what if one of these authors, or even both, thinks they are badly treated, misunderstood, underestimated? So it is with these added pressures that I have embarked upon this adventure.
Notes
1
“It is a way of talking about the way in which things depend on each other. And the act of weaving is an activity that creates dependence, passing over and under.” Stengers,
Activer les possibles
, Noville-sur-Méhaigne: Éditions Esperluète, 2018, p. 95.
2
“What Deleuze sometimes calls ‘friendship’ doesn’t have much to do with a friendship between persons, it’s much more the knowledge that with this person, it’s not necessary to explain oneself too much and that an ‘exchange’ might be possible, like an entangled double flight.” Isabelle Stengers,
La Vierge et le Neutrino: Les scientifiques dans la tourmente
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: Seuil: 2006, p. 161. English translation:
The Virgin Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble
, trans. Andrew Goffey, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022 (in press). Goffey renders the titular phrase as “an entangled double flight.” Elsewhere, Stengers writes: “Guattari has a beautiful phrase: There is a relationship between philosophy and friendship. And so, the modes of working with philosophers take place in a strange way, this friendship . . . but not in the sense of old mates who meet up and slap each other’s backs, etc., but it is true that it is a space of practices that are quite distinct from the space of scientific practices.” Isabelle Stengers, “Discipline et interdiscipline: la philosophie de ‘l’écologie des pratiques’ interrogée,”
NSS
8(3) (2000): 59–63.
3
Concerning the many encounters scattered along Latour’s journey, one can refer to Gerard de Vries,
Bruno Latour
, Cambridge: Polity, Key Contemporary Thinkers, 2016. But this book ignores all of Stengers, and as such it is unsatisfactory! There is not yet an equivalent book on Stengers.
4
Bruno Latour,
The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. In the English edition, there are three dedicatees, including Stengers.
5
Isabelle Stengers,
The Invention of Modern Science
, trans. Daniel Smith, (Theory Out of Bounds, 19), MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
6
Isabelle Stengers,
Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: La Découverte, 2009. English translation:
In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism
, trans. Andrew Goffey, London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
7
Bruno Latour,
Cogitamus: Six lettres sur les humanités scientifiques
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: La Découverte, 2010; Bruno Latour,
Enquête sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des modernes
, Paris: Seuil, 2012. English translation:
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
8
Tobie Nathan, Isabelle Stengers, and Lucien Hounkpatin,
La Damnation de Freud
(a play in four acts), Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: La Découverte, 1997. Isabelle Stengers,
La Guerre des sciences aura-t-elle lieu? Scientifiction
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: Seuil, 2001.
9
Isabelle Stengers,
Penser avec Whitehead. Une libre et sauvage création de concepts
, Paris: Seuil, 2002. English translation:
Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts
, trans. Michael Chase, foreword by Bruno Latour, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 463. Translation modified.
10
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, pp. 228–9. Translation modified.
11
Didier Debaise, “Les âmes du monde,” in Fleur Courtois-L’Heureux and Aline Wiame, Étienne Souriau: une ontologie de l’instauration, Paris: Vrin, 2015, pp. 111–29.
12
Latour,
The Politics of Nature
, pp. 249–50.
13
Latour,
The Politics of Nature
, p. 237.
14
Bruno Latour,
Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: La Découverte, 2013 (2002). English translation,
Rejoicing: or the Torments of Religious Speech
, trans. Julie Rose, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013, p. 5. Translation modified.
15
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, p. 464.
16
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, pp. 307–8. Translation modified.
17
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, p. 404. Translation modified.
18
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, p. 73.
19
This passage only appears in the original French edition,
Penser avec Whitehead
, p. 392 [Trans].
20
Bruno Latour, “La connaissance est-elle un mode d’existence? Rencontre au muséum de James, Fleck et Whitehead avec des fossiles de chevaux,” in Didier Debaise (ed.),
Vie et expérimentation: Peirce, James, Dewey
, Paris: Vrin, 2007, pp. 17–43. Translation: “A Textbook Case Revisited: Knowledge as Mode of Existence,” in E. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wacjman (eds),
The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 83–112. References in this book are to the more readily available text on Bruno Latour’s website (
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/49.html
) p. 12 [Trans.].
21
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, pp. 464, 465.
22
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, p. 518.
23
Isabelle Stengers,
L’Hypnose entre magie et science
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series. Paris: Seuil, 2002, p. 140.
24
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, p. 462.
25
Isabelle Stengers, “Que vas-tu faire de moi?” in Fleur Courtois-L’Heureux and Aline Wiame (eds),
Étienne Souriau
, op. cit., pp. 63–85. Here it is interesting to pick up on Whitehead’s terms. “Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism [i.e., Whitehead’s] inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought.” Alfred North Whitehead,
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne, New York: Free Press, 1978 (1929), p. 151. This was discussed by Didier Debaise in “Alfred North Whitehead. Les sujets possessifs,” in Didier Debaise (ed.),
Philosophie des possessions
, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, pp. 233–51. It is helpful to cite this passage as well: “The philosophy of organism [i.e., Whitehead’s] is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy.
The Critique of Pure Reason describes
the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction. For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world . . .” (p. 88).
26
“Tracking” in the sense highlighted by Baptiste Morizot, when a human “postulates that there are things to translate and . . . tries to learn. With this kind of attention, one is always in the process of garnering signs, always in the process of forging links, noting flashes of strangeness, and thinking up stories to make them comprehensible . . .” Baptiste Morizot,
Manières d’être vivant
, Arles: Actes Sud, 2020, p. 139.
27
Thinking in a speculative way means “intensifying the importance of an experience to the highest degree.” See Didier Debaise, “L’intensification de l’expérience,” in Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (eds),
Gestes spéculatifs
, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2015, p. 112.
28
Stengers,
Thinking with Whitehead
, pp. 215–16, citing Étienne Souriau, “Du mode d’existence de l’œuvre à faire,”
Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie
, February 25, 1956, pp. 4–24. English translation:
The Different Modes of Existence, Followed by, Of the Mode of Existence of the Work to be Made
, Introduction by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015.
29
Bruno Latour, “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s
Les différents modes d’existence
,” trans. Stephen Muecke, in Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Nick Srnicek (eds),
The Speculative Turn
, Melbourne: re.press, 2011, pp. 304–33, p. 311.
30
Isabelle Stengers,
Réactiver le sens commun: Lecture de Whitehead en temps de débâcle
, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series, Paris: La Découverte, 2002, p. 165. English translation by T. Lamarre:
Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022, p. 150. The idea of a middle voice, contrasting with active and passive, doesn’t exist in French, unlike many other languages, for instance Greek. See Émile Benveniste,
Problems in General Linguistics
, trans. M. E. Meek, Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971, pp. 145–52.
31
Stengers,
Making Sense in Common
, p. 151.
32
It is on this very question that Whitehead is in debt to William James. “Beginning with the
Principles
, James will therefore introduce arguments that will be picked up again in his famous article ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ of which Whitehead, on the occasion of its publication in 1904, wrote that it ‘inaugurated a new era in philosophy’ succeeding that which was opened up by the
Discourse on Method
.” Isabelle Stengers, “William James. Naturalisme et pragmatisme au fil de la question de la possession,” in Didier Debaise (ed.),
Philosophie des possessions
, op. cit., pp. 35–69. This article deals in detail with the question of the “I,” which is only briefly examined here.
33
Bruno Latour, “Pourquoi Péguy se répète-t-il? Péguy est-il illisible?”, republished in Camille Riquier (ed.),
Charles Péguy
, Paris: Les Cahiers du Cerf, 2014, pp. 339–63. This text was part of Latour’s doctoral thesis in philosophy:
Exégèse et Philosophie
, Université de Tours, 1975.
34
Bruno Latour,
Enquête sur les Modes d’existence
, Paris: La Découverte, 2012. English translation:
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013; Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, “The Sphinx of the Work,” preface to Étienne Souriau’s
The Different Modes of Existence, followed by, Of the Mode of Existence of the Work to be Made
, trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015. This “light touch” can perhaps be associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s “allusion” cited by Stengers in
Penser avec Whitehead
(p. 543) as “Philosophy as a gigantic allusion” (p. 150 of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?
, Paris: Minuit, 1991. This sentence is curiously not included on p. 159 of
What is Philosophy?
trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [Trans.]).
35
Stengers,
Activer les possibles
, p. 138.
36
The simplest definition of pragmatism is the following: “The pragmatic method is . . . to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.” William James,
Pragmatism
, New York: Longmans, Green, 1907, p. 45.
37
