Abstract
Claiming that Bruno Latour is one of the most influential contemporary thinkers is an understatement. We may even speculate that he is due to replace Foucault as the key figure in the human sciences. This comparison is certainly relevant since Latour has always been interested in power and has shifted the focus of attention from science to politics in the STS field. 1 Strangely enough though, to this day political theory has remained largely impervious to his work. This is unfortunate not the least because Latour has produced one of the most remarkable twentieth-century political theories of science. 2 Under such circumstances, Harman’s book is to be greeted as an overdue attempt to redress this lack. In contrast to many of Latour’s followers and critics, Harman refuses to read Latour monolithically. The second most important contribution of his work is undoubtedly that he succeeds in substantiating that Latour must be put in the plural.
The book is composed of preliminary notes on Latour’s life and work, an introduction, seven chapters, of which five are devoted to Latour and two to his relations with the Left and the Right, and closes with short concluding remarks.
In the Introduction, Harman cleverly combines the modern Left–Right dichotomy with a second dualism, truth politics versus power politics. Truth politics, which feeds on rationalism, is characterized by a pursuit of truth that should lead to the establishment of an ideal form of society. The Left version is represented by Badiou and Žižek, and the Right version by Plato and Strauss. In contrast, power politics claims there is no standard of right and wrong. The Left version materializes in the identity politics of postmodernist intellectuals, whom Harman fails to identify, whereas Hobbes and Schmitt are the best exemplars of the Right version. Harman locates Latour in this fourth quadrant, and argues that his overall intellectual progression amounts to an attempt to free himself from Hobbes’s influence. Drawing upon the pragmatist tradition, Harman argues, Latour is now seeking to replace these modernist dualisms by an “object-oriented political philosophy”, called Dingpolitik. For Harman, this philosophy acknowledges that “struggles are prompted by external irritants” (p. 6); that is, Latour “adds inanimate entities to the political sphere” (p. 5). This identification of external irritants and inanimate entities, or “issues” and “objects” in Latour’s terminology, is deeply problematic from an analytical viewpoint (see below). Unfortunately, when returning to Dingpolitik in his final chapter, Harman shies away from confronting this problem.
Chapter 1, by far the most illuminating of the book, lays the groundwork that justifies the further exploration of Latour’s political thinking. Harman uses as his starting point an article by IR scholar Peer Schouten who discusses Latour in relation to social contract theory. For those, like the present reviewer, who had not yet read Schouten’s piece, this discussion is nothing short of a revelation. Following Schouten, Harman emphasizes the considerable influence Hobbes had on Latour. Though Harman departs from Schouten’s suggestion that Latour locates the state of nature in baboon society, he agrees that the hobbesian war of all against all is matched in Latour’s ontology by the power struggle of entities, and that Latour’s Leviathan emerges from the presence of nonhumans, which provide the stability and durability that human society would otherwise lack.
Chapter 2 describes the early period of Latour, which runs until 1991, and whose emblematic text is The Pasteurization of France/Irreductions. Harman shows very effectively that Latour has been influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche in portraying reality as an array of forces involved in an endless power struggle, each trying to become stronger than the others. Latour sees in Hobbes’s theory of political representation a prefiguration of his own sociology of translation, but stretches sovereignty to a range of actors who have become “obligatory passage points”, that is, they can take less powerful actors in their grip. Crucially, Harman claims that for early Latour “politics is simply a metaphor for reality” (p. 49). The “ontologization of politics” is Latour’s original sin, which he has allegedly been trying to escape for many years. Yet the plausibility of this interpretation is dependent on Harman’s astonishing omission of the 1983 paper “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” Not only is this essay crucial to grasping Latour’s analysis of the political organization of modernity, 3 it also demonstrates that, in fact, Latour’s trajectory has been to move from politics to ontology.
In chapter 3, devoted to the 1991–2007 period, Harman claims that middle Latour tries to revive some form of transcendence in order to soften his earlier “might makes right” philosophy. He tackles Politics of Nature along with two other texts that clearly stand apart in Latour’s career because they explicitly aim at redefining politics. Harman nicely emphasizes that whilst early Latour granted nonhumans a stabilizing role for society, middle Latour sees them as disruptors, hence his depiction of politics in terms of cosmopolitics, the composition of the common world, or the parliament of things. Yet these concepts and the theoretical elaborations that sustain them should warrant an extreme vigilance since they are typical of Latour’s expository style, which obscures nodal points in the structure of his argument. Unfortunately, Harman’s exegesis does not extend beyond surface description.
Chapter 4 tackles the new conceptual system synthesized by late Latour in the 2012 book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Harman explains that the flat ontology of actants that had been his trademark since the beginning of his career has been abandoned. Politics is now conceived as one mode of existence, one regime of enunciation, among others such as science, religion, law, etc. Each one is characterized by a specific way of accessing truth, and politics should be judged according to its own criteria, not those of science. No doubt we are still dealing with Latour’s lifelong battle against rationalism. Sadly, here again Harman unquestioningly accepts Latour’s stance and makes no attempt to probe his premise, namely, that modes of existence are essentially modes of veridiction.
In chapter 5 Harman does a very good job at challenging the purity and righteousness of the Left, always prompt at excommunicating those, like Latour, who are not engaged in the Critique of Capitalism. He makes provocative claims to challenge the so-called incompatibility of Latour’s thinking with typical concerns of the Left, such as slavery or the economic divide between the West and the rest of the world. Had he substantiated his claims, he would have gone a long way to position Latour as a theorist who ought to be taken seriously by all strands of political analysis.
Chapter 6 is intended to discuss the relations between Latour and the Right, personified by Schmitt. Harman focuses on Schmitt’s famous essay “The notion of the political”, and devotes long developments to its reception by Strauss, Žižek and Mouffe. Unfortunately, this is done at the expense of the discussion of the Schmitt/Latour relation, which is restricted to three points. First, a few quotes from Latour illustrate what differentiates his view of the state of exception from Schmitt’s. Latour argues that for Schmitt the political leads to the state of exception in rare occasions when, in fact, the political is exceptional in itself because of the peculiarity of political talk. Second, a brief discussion of his 2013 lectures on climate change, now published in Face à Gaïa, brings to light his use of the notions of enmity and state of war in a context somewhat remote from the ground where we might expect them: “Latour is calling for Schmittian warfare against climate change skeptics” (p.144). Third, a few lines show that Latour does not share Schmitt’s obsession with liberalism’s depoliticizations. Though Harman does not point it out, Latour’s view stands opposite to that of Constant or Tocqueville: political non-participation is not a threat to political freedom, it is an ideal to achieve. This is because many aspects of politics are, and should remain, routinized administrative processes.
Chapter 7 returns to the already mentioned Dingpolitik, which appears to be Latour’s official political philosophy since 2005. Harman devotes a great deal of attention to Dewey’s and even more so to Lippman’s book who, according to Latour, have made a revolution in political theory by putting at the forefront of politics the issues that give rise to a variety of publics. For Latour, this amounts to a replacement of political subjects by objects. The trouble is, “object” can refer either to an artefact, say a dress or electron, as well as to a topic or issue. We are facing here one of those shifts of meaning typical of Latour’s thinking. Unfortunately, instead of confronting this problem head on, Harman chooses to employ the syntagm “issues/objects” rather than question what is at stake in this ambiguity.
In his concluding remarks, Harman recaps the main statement that pervades his account: Latour is, albeit unwittingly, a descendent of Socrates. Claiming that politics is generated by objects that cause surprise, his political philosophy thus makes room for ignorance.
Despite the criticisms advanced in this review, we should conclude by welcoming Harman’s text. It breaks new ground in providing a much overdue demonstration for political theorists and STS scholars alike that Latour is, and has always been, a political theorist.