| Bruno Latour | |
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French sociologist of science and anthropologist. ANT and STS theorist |
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| Born | 22 June 1947 Beaune, France |
| Occupation | Professor at Sciences Po |
| Notable works | Laboratory life (1979), Science in action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Politics of nature (1999) |
| Influenced by | Harold Garfinkel, Gabriel Tarde |
Bruno Latour (born 22 June 1947, Beaune, Côte-d'Or) is a French sociologist of science [1] and anthropologist[2] and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).[3] After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he is now Professor and vice-president for research at Sciences Po Paris (2007),[4] where he is associated with the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO).
He is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987).[5] Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist[5] approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour has diverged significantly from such approaches. Latour is best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice.[6] Along with Michel Callon and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor-network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde.
In 2007, Latour was listed as the 10th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide.[7]
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Latour is related to a well-known family of winemakers from Burgundy, but is not associated with the similarly named estate in Bordeaux.
As a student, Latour originally focused on philosophy and was deeply influenced by Michel Serres. He quickly developed an interest in anthropology, and undertook fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire which resulted in a brief monograph on decolonization, race, and industrial relations.[5]
After spending more than 20 years at the Centre de sociologie de l'innovation at the École des Mines in Paris, Latour moved in 2006 to the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he is the first occupant of a Chair named for Gabriel Tarde. In recent years he has also served as one of the curators of successful art exhibitions at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, including "Iconoclash" (2002) and "Making Things Public" (2005).
On 22 May 2008, Latour was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Montréal on the occasion of an organizational communication conference held in honor of the work of James R. Taylor, on whom Latour has had an important influence.
After his early career efforts, Latour shifted his research interests to focus on laboratory scientists. Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar. In the book, the authors undertake an ethnographic study of a neuroendocrinology research laboratory at the Salk Institute.[5] This early work argued that naïve descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice.
In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.
Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory—that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. They view scientific activity as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices— in short, science is reconstructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Latour's 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is one of the key texts of the sociology of scientific knowledge in which he famously wrote his Second Principle as follows: "Scientist and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favor."
Latour's position and findings provoked vehement rebuttals. Gross and Leavitt argue that, when applied to non-scientific contexts, Latour's position becomes absurd: if a group of coworkers in a windowless room were debating whether or not it were raining outside and went outdoors to discover raindrops in the air and puddles on the soil, the rain, on Latour's hypothesis, would have been socially constructed.[8] Similarly, philosopher John Searle[9] argues that Latour's "extreme social constructivist" position is seriously flawed on several points, and furthermore has inadvertently "comical results."
After a research project examining the sociology of primatologists, Latour followed up the themes in Laboratory Life with Les Microbes: guerre et paix (published in English as The Pasteurization of France in 1984). In it, he reviews the life and career of one of France's most famous scientists Louis Pasteur and his discovery of microbes, in the fashion of a political biography. Latour highlights the social forces at work in and around Pasteur's career and the uneven manner in which his theories were accepted. By providing more explicitly ideological explanations for the acceptance of Pasteur's work more easily in some quarters than in others, he seeks to undermine the notion that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is primarily, or even usually, a matter of experiment, evidence or reason. Another work, Aramis, or, The Love of Technology focuses on the history of an unsuccessful mass-transit project.
More recently Latour has turned to more "theoretical" and programmatic works. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he was one of the key thinkers in actor-network theory. His more theoretical books include Science in Action, Pandora's Hope, and perhaps his most popular work, We Have Never Been Modern, originally published as Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : Essais d’anthropologie symétrique. [10]
In a lengthy 2004 article,[11] Latour questioned the fundamental premises on which he'd based most of his career, asking, "Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?" He undertakes a trenchant critique of his own field of study and, more generally, of social criticism in contemporary academia. He suggests that critique, as currently practiced, is bordering on irrelevancy. To maintain any vitality, Latour argues that social critiques require a drastic reappraisal: “our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget.” (p. 231) To regain focus and credibility, Latour argues that social critiques must embrace empiricism, to insist on the “cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude -- to speak like William James”. (p. 233)
Latour suggests that about 90% of contemporary social criticism displays one of two approaches which he terms “the fact position and the fairy position.” (p. 237) The fact position is anti-fetishist, arguing that “objects of belief” (e.g., religion, arts) are merely concepts onto which power is projected; the “fairy position” argues that individuals are dominated, often covertly and without their awareness, by external forces (e.g., economics, gender). (p. 238) “Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?” asks Latour: no matter which position you take, “You’re always right!” (p. 238-239) Social critics tend to use anti-fetishism against ideas they personally reject; to use “an unrepentant positivist” approach for fields of study they consider valuable; all the while thinking as “a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish.” (p. 241) These inconsistencies and double standards go largely unrecognized in social critique because “there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position.” (p. 241)
The practical result of these approaches being taught to millions of students in elite universities for several decades is a widespread and influential “critical barbarity” that has—like a malign virus created by a "mad scientist" -- thus far proven impossible to control. Most troubling, Latour notes that critical ideas have been appropriated by those he describes as conspiracy theorists, including global warming skeptics and the 9/11 Truth movement: “Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but I am worried to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland, many of the weapons of social critique.” (p. 230)
Latour's work, We Have Never Been Modern, was first published in 1991, and was translated into English by Catherine Porter in 1993. It was originally published as Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : Essais d’anthropologie symétrique in French.
Latour encourages the reader in this anthropology of science to re-think and re-evaluate our mental landscape. He evaluates the work of scientists and contemplates on the contribution of the scientific method to knowledge and work, blurring the distinction across various fields and disciplines.[12]
Latour argues that society has never really been modern and promotes anti-modernism (or non-modernism) over postmodernism (or modernism).[13] His stance is that we have never been modern and minor divisions alone separate humanity now from other collectives.[14] Latour views post-modernism as an era that annuls the entire past in its wake, and therefore he presents the anti-modern reaction as accepting of such entities as spirit, rationality, liberty, society, God, or even the past.[15] Post-moderns, according to Latour, view the modern world as a total and irreversible invention that completely breaks with the past.[16] In contrast, the anti-modern approach even accepts the possibility of post-modernism where the entire past has been annulled.[17] Still, Latour refers to pre-modernism as illegitimate as post-moderns have never been critical enough to reflect that a yesteryear or an Old Regime does not exist.[18]
Latour attempts to prove through case studies the fallacy in the old object/subject and subject/society compacts of modernity, which can be traced back to Plato.[19][20] He refuses the concept of “out there” versus “in here”.[21] He renders the object/subject distinction as simply unusable and charts a new approach towards knowledge, work, and circulating reference.[22] Latour considers anti-moderns to be playing on a different field, one vastly different than that of post-moderns.[23] He refers to it as much broader and much less polemical, a creation of an unknown territory, which he playfully refers to as the Middle Kingdom.[24]
Pandora's Hope (1999) marks a return to the themes Latour explored in Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern. It uses independent but thematically linked essays and case studies to question the authority and reliability of scientific knowledge. Latour uses a narrative, anecdotal approach in a number of the essays, describing his work with pedologists in the Amazon rainforest, the development of the pasteurization process, and the research of French atomic scientists at the outbreak of the Second World War. Latour states that this specific, anecdotal approach to science studies is essential to gaining a full understanding of the discipline: "The only way to understand the reality of science studies is to follow what science studies does best, that is, paying close attention to the details of scientific practice" (24). Some authors have criticized Latour's methodology, including Katherine Pandora, a history of science professor at the University of Oklahoma. In her review of Pandora's Hope, Katherine Pandora states:
"[Latour's] writing can be stimulating, fresh and at times genuinely moving, but it can also display a distractingly mannered style in which a rococo zeal for compounding metaphors, examples, definitions and abstractions can frustrate even readers who approach his work with the best of intentions (notwithstanding the inclusion of a nine-page glossary of terms and liberal use of diagrams in an attempt to achieve the utmost clarity)".[25]
In addition to his epistemological concerns, Latour also explores the political dimension of science studies in Pandora's Hope. Two of the chapters draw on Plato's Gorgias as a means of investigating and highlighting the distinction between content and context. As Katherine Pandora states in her review:
"It is hard not to be caught up in the author's obvious delight in deploying a classic work from antiquity to bring current concerns into sharper focus, following along as he manages to leave the reader with the impression that the protagonists Socrates and Callicles are not only in dialogue with each other but with Latour as well."[25]
Although Latour frames his discussion with a classical model, his examples of fraught political issues are all current and of continuing relevance: global warming, the spread of mad cow disease, and the carcinogenic effects of smoking are all mentioned at various points in Pandora's Hope. In Felix Stalder's article "Beyond constructivism: towards a realistic realism", he summarizes Latour's position on the political dimension of science studies as follows: "These scientific debates have been artificially kept open in order to render impossible any political action against these problems and those who profit from them".[26]
In Reassembling the Social (2005),[27] Latour continues a reappraisal of his work, developing what he calls a “practical metaphysics,” which calls “real” anything that an actor (one who we are studying) claims as a source of motivation for action. So if someone says, “I was inspired by God to be charitable to my neighbors,” we are obliged to recognize the “ontological weight” of their claim, rather than attempting to replace their belief in God’s presence with “social stuff,” like class, gender, imperialism, etc. Latour’s nuanced metaphysics demands the existence of a plurality of worlds, and the willingness of the researcher to chart ever more. He argues that researchers must give up the hope of fitting their actors into a structure or framework, but Latour believes the benefits of this sacrifice far outweigh the downsides: “Their complex metaphysics would at least be respected, their recalcitrance recognized, their objections deployed, their multiplicity accepted.”[27]
For Latour, to talk about metaphysics or ontology–what really is–means paying close empirical attention to the various, contradictory institutions and ideas that bring people together and inspire them to act. Here is Latour's description of metaphysics:
If we call metaphysics the discipline . . . that purports to define the basic structure of the world, then empirical metaphysics is what the controversies over agencies lead to since they ceaselessly populate the world with new drives and, as ceaselessly, contest the existence of others. The question then becomes how to explore the actors' own metaphysics.[27]
A more traditional metaphysician might object, arguing that this means there are multiple, contradictory realities, since there are "controversies over agencies"–since there is a plurality of contradictory ideas that people claim as a basis for action (God, nature, the state, sexual drives, personal ambition, and so on). This objection manifests the most important difference between traditional philosophical metaphysics and Latour's nuance: for Latour, there is no "basic structure of reality" or a single, self-consistent world. An unknowably large multiplicity of realities, or "worlds" in his terms, exists–one for each actor’s sources of agency, inspirations for action. Actors bring "the real" (metaphysics) into being. The task of the researcher is not to find one "basic structure" that explains agency, but to recognize "the metaphysical innovations proposed by ordinary actors".[27] Mapping those metaphysical innovations involves a strong dedication to relativism, Latour argues. The relativist researcher "learns the actors' language," records what they say about what they do, and does not appeal to a higher "structure" to "explain" the actor's motivations. The relativist "takes seriously what [actors] are obstinately saying" and "follows the direction indicated by their fingers when they designate what 'makes them act'". The relativist recognizes the plurality of metaphysics that actors bring into being, and attempts to map them rather than reducing them to a single structure or explanation.