Where would STS be without Latour? What would be missing?

In his book Prince of Networks, Graham Harman imagines a paradise – which would be the definition of ‘hell’ for certain Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars – a future where Bruno Latour’s metaphysics

Let’s try to imagine the opposite and follow the thought experiment laid out in Latour’s famous or infamous article on the door closer (written under the pseudonym of Jim Johnson): ‘ … every time you want to know what a nonhuman [or human?] does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present’ (Johnson, 1988: 299). What would STS be without Latour? What would be missing? Some would say nothing. I would argue a lot.

When I was doing my PhD with Latour at the Centre de Sociologie de 1’Innovation at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, one of my jobs was to teach engineers sociology of science. Though Science in Action was on the list of required readings, the only way to make my students pay any attention to the book was to tell them that it was taught at MIT! As we know, it is always in America that French intellectuals win their lettres de noblesse. This was in the 1990s, some 4 years after Science in Action had appeared in English, and 2 years after it hit the market in France. Actor-network theory (ANT) was relatively unknown; indeed, I never knew what Latour was referring to when he began talking about ‘actor-network theory’, since I had known it as La sociologie de la traduction [the sociology of translation]. At this time Latour was not very well known in France, and his work, insofar as it had an audience, was received with incomprehension or out-and-out hostility by the academic establishment, with the exception of François Dagognet, the prolific French philosopher who presided over Latour’s jury of agrégation de philosophie. It is thanks to Dagognet that I first heard of Latour. While studying with Dagognet for my DEA (Masters) at the Sorbonne, I told him of my interest in trying to understand how science worked ‘in reality’ – that is, in practice. He told me that this had already been done by Latour, who was teaching only a few blocks away at the Ecole des Mines. His advice was to talk to him and join his ‘atelier’. ¹

This is how I began my PhD and how I became acquainted with Science in Action (Latour, 1987). What I experienced upon meeting Latour and reading his book was tantamount to a paradigm shift: I had been trained according to a specific paradigm in the philosophy of science, a mix of the Anglo-Saxon (Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, and Feyerabend) and the French traditions (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Dagognet, and Koyré). Latour’s work didn’t correspond to anything that I had read or studied before; it swept the ground from beneath my feet, creating as much discomfort as it did pleasure. I was forced to reassess everything that I thought I knew about science and its specificity.

In Latour’s account, the specificity of science didn’t reside in the fact that scientists follow an a-historical or a-contextual methodology, or that their work conforms to universal norms, or that it shares common presuppositions or paradigms. Rather, science was something much messier, because its practitioners were human beings who argue, disagree, misunderstand, ignore, betray, talk past one another, and sometimes even agree, but who always, and in every eventuality, talk and write (a lot). Thanks to Popper I knew that scientists had dreams and phantasms; from Merton I had learned that they could be immoral; and I understood from my reading of Kuhn that they, like everyone else, were subject to emotional crises. But as far as these authors were concerned, what was given to the scientists (a certain form of humanity) was immediately taken away for the sake of science. Thus, they invented elaborate systems to contain scientists’ subjectivity: hence for Popper the distinction between the context of discovery (the realm of imagination) and the context of justification (the realm of logic and method); for Merton the distinction between ‘normal’ institutions and ‘scientific’ institutions ruled by universalistic norms; and for Kuhn the distinction between a conflicted philosophical pre-paradigmatic science and the calm and orderly settled scientific paradigm, and so on. In all my studies, there had always been ruptures and distinctions between what belonged to science and what did not; this resulted in scientists who were, for lack of a better term, schizophrenic. By ‘schizophrenic’ I mean scientists who are internally fractured, who are on the one hand creative and on the other critical (in line with the philosophies of Popper and Bachelard), who are interested or moral (Merton), or who are extraordinary or just normal (Kuhn). After Latour, all these a priori distinctions suddenly became unnecessary, for the specificity of science wasn’t to be found in the unique cognitive abilities or moral competencies of the scientist. The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) had shown this as well, but Latour was making a different move.

Science, in Latour’s view, was not about ‘discovering’ or ‘unveiling’ a hidden reality, but about the construction of a reality capable of resisting the strongest objections made by others. To the question: ‘How does a new and original idea come to mind?’ we were told to ask, rather, by which complicated displacements can scientists succeed in creating what is impossible: a new fact of which they are the author? Instead of looking at the mind, we were told to focus on the practices of writing and visualizing capable of mobilizing the world by fixing it, making it flat, and thus making it modifiable (recombinable and/or superimposable) in terms of scale and mobility; and then we were told to follow how those inscriptions, now immutable mobiles, were reincorporated into texts. Latour, in this sense, offered an opening onto the real challenge of the anthropology of science – the possibility of producing a convincing study of formalism, without which phantoms of the cognitive dimension would continue nourishing the mysterious power of science.

Formalism, mathematics, theoretical work, and logic could thus become legitimate and demythologized objects of study, practices like any other ² . Taking up Dagognet’s love for inscriptions, graphs, and classification, and more generally the idea that thoughts can be read on the surfaces of things, Latour’s innovation was to redirect the philosophy of science towards the anthropology of inscriptions and their circulation.

But what was at stake in Science in Action was as much about Latour’s attack on ‘social’ explanations as about immutable mobiles and the role of non-humans. ³ If Latour was fighting the French epistemological tradition (as represented by Bachelard and Canguilhem), he was also fighting French sociology (particularly, Bourdieu) and allying with Luc Boltansky and Laurent Thévenot (see, for example, Mialet, 2003). The principle of generalized symmetry was the coup de grace – in the tradition of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud – to the predominance of the subject, reduced here to the rank of the non-human. While social constructivists fought against methodological individualism, ANT jettisoned the belief in a pre-existing social reality that constrains the behavior of individuals by reintroducing the role of non-humans. Thus, if studying the psychology of scientists was forbidden – as this might lead to an epistemology that established science as rationality of method or of cognitive processes ⁴ – so too was the use of sociological explanations of science as this might lead to a sociology that values norms of the community (Merton), or that attributes hidden interests to the actor (Bourdieu and SSK).

With what were we left to study the actors of knowledge production? Latour’s innovation was to direct our attention to the traces left by humans and things circulating through the collective, a kind of palpability, a materialization of their presence and action. The importance of using the tools of anthropology, namely ethnographic observation, and the imperative ‘to go into the field’ was more than a methodological prescription; it was the backbone of the theory itself. For ANT, actors were not endowed a priori with specific competences. These competences were constructed in trials of strength. And it was only in a network that their qualities could be revealed. The strength of the actor was linked, in this sense, to the solidity and number of associations woven and stabilized in the network. In ANT, actors were the spokespersons for all the humans and nonhumans with which they associated. Indeed, the actor is equal to the sum total of the associations that she weaves. If one association disappears, new displacements appear to divert actors from obligatory passage points, spokespersons are denounced or undermined, and the actor who holds the network together changes along with the configuration of the network. In ANT, we find that the actor is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time: sometimes a particular node, sometimes an entire network, sometimes flesh, sometimes matter, sometimes an all powerful social genius, sometimes absent, and sometimes interchangeable (Mialet, 2009). As Chateauraynaud says:

A descriptive and specific category of the human being is missing. … It is a kind of anthropology inspired by Hume that seems to forbid any autonomy to questions relative to the human actor, to her dispositions (cognitive and esthetic capacities), to her interactions with her peers [ses semblables], to her motivations to act or to her interpretative elaborations. (Chateauraynaud, 1992: 477, my translation)

My challenge, upon becoming acquainted with Latour’s work, was how to rethink the characteristics of the human being or the knowing subject by using the tools, the strengths, and taking into account the limits of ANT (Mialet, 1999, 2012). In other words, what could we say about singularity? And more specifically – in the present context – what can we say about the singularity of Bruno Latour? Let’s do what he suggests, and follow the inscriptions.

In Science in Action, Latour says: ‘You need [others] to make your [book] a decisive one. If they laugh at you, if they are indifferent, if they shrug it off, that is the end of your [book]’ (Latour, 1987: 104). But ‘there is something still worse … than being either criticized or dismantled by careless readers: it is being ignored’ (p. 40). None of this happened to Science in Action. Indeed, it was carefully crafted to make sure of this. Today, after having read it one more time with this essay in mind, I see running under its skin numerous articulations that make Latour’s way of thinking so specific. For example: (1) His interest in religion that directed his attention toward the circulation of statements; (2) His interest in semiotics – developed with Françoise Bastide – that allowed him to avoid making distinctions between humans and nonhumans and to move from the micro to the macro without changing repertoires; (3) His interest in inscriptions, building on the French tradition in epistemology with François Dagognet; (4) His interest in integrating social and natural sciences, and literary and scientific cultures, in the lineage of Michel Serres; (5) His interest, developed in conversation with Michel Callon, in understanding the creation of asymmetries and irreversibilities, and in the possibility of acting at a distance. ⁵ But also, I could see how Latour chose his allies and attempted to ‘weaken’ or ‘paralyze’ his ‘enemies’ (p. 37), and how he tried to rethink and rewrite, appropriate, and inflect, the ideas of other scholars, and to place them in new and different contexts. Shapin, Collins, and Yearley, for example, have all commented on how Latour endeavored to enroll SSK to fight his own battles, by trying to convince them that their way forward had been cut off or was a dead end – thus putting into action the second moment of translation (Latour, 1987: 120). Latour was criticized as morally dangerous (Amsterdamska, 1990), or not revolutionary at all; indeed, what he was offering was perceived as a retreat or a step backward (Collins and Yearley, 1992; Shapin, 1988). To use Latour’s own vocabulary, he didn’t succeed in enrolling the sociologists of scientific knowledge ‘in the construction of ANT’, nor did he succeed in controlling their behavior ‘in order to make their action predictable’ (Latour, 1987: 108). As Harman comments: Latour is ‘attacked simultaneously for opposite reasons. For mainstream defenders of science, he is just another soft French relativist who denies the reality of the external world. But for disciples of Bloor and Bourdieu, his commerce with non-humans makes him a sellout to fossilized classical realism’ (Harman, 2009: 5). Shapin (1988) was quick to mention that if scientists in Latour’s account didn’t have ‘interests’, they certainly seemed to have goals. And according to him, one could rewrite Science in Action in terms of ‘investments’. ⁶ Moreover, he complained of the absence of any role for skill in Latour’s account. Latour, with Callon, in turn rewrote and enrolled his critics by adding and attributing skill at every step:

Our general symmetry principle is thus not to alternate between natural realism and social realism but to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity, one that is more interesting for us. We call it network building, or collective things, or quasi-objects, or trials of force … ; and others call it skill, forms of life, material practice. … ’ (Callon and Latour, 1992: 348) ⁷

Despite their criticisms, Latour, true to his method, attempted to enroll his critics as allies. Thus, Latour concluded that Collins and Yearley were interested in the same things without knowing it: ‘once we abandon the twin resources of nature and society, we are all, it seems, looking for the same “explanation” – the stabilization of [Mary] Hesse’s or some other associationist network – but we disagree on what a network is made of and how to empirically calculate or account for [it]’ (Callon and Latour, 1992: 363). Is Science in Action then an autobiography?

For sure, the multiple translations that composed the specific texture of this book – I tried here to pinpoint a few of the traditions with which it is intertwined – as much as the multiple translations in which the book was caught up, transformed Latour into an important player in the field and by the very same process fleshed out his theories (or made them truer?). In other words, it showed by which complicated displacements one can succeed in creating what is impossible: a new theory of which he is the author. And indeed, thanks to all of us, allies, critics, or enemies, and of course, Latour’s own charisma and insight – those very facts that his theory fails to take into account – STS became populated with interesting new entities, ideas or concepts: the non-human, the immutable mobile or inscription, the center of calculation, and more broadly, a redefinition of the social and the political, as well as a new role for the social sciences. It seems difficult now to avoid these innovations, unless we declare, not a 10-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science as Latour proposed at the end of Science in Action (p. 247), but rather a 10-year moratorium on Latour’s own symmetrical anthropology.