Abstract
I am deeply saddened by the loss of Bruno Latour, a figure who influenced the field of science and technology studies more than anybody else, who has been the field’s most visible ambassador to neighboring fields, and who was for a great many of us a valued mentor and interlocutor. Bruno kept moving and kept us moving, giving us insight after insight and idea after idea. He also kept critically analyzing his own work, sometimes improving on it, sometimes building on it, sometimes challenging it, and sometimes simply turning his attention elsewhere. The rest of us had to decide when we wanted to catch up, and when we would wait for the dust to settle.
Bruno passed away as this issue was heading toward press, and so I can offer only the beginning of a reflection on his work here. We at this journal will hold space to reflect on his many contributions more fully in a future issue. No doubt we will be learning from and grappling with those contributions for a very long time.
Bruno’s work in STS and nearby areas spanned more than four decades. When the Society for Social Studies of Science held its very first meeting in 1976, Bruno was already there, one of a band of iconoclasts already challenging presumed orthodoxies. With others – that specific group included such figures as Harry Collins, Karin Knorr, John Law, Dorothy Nelkin, Sal Restivo, and Steve Woolgar – Bruno was working out how to study science in action. His insistence on that eventually became the first ‘rule of method’ and the title of his 1987 book.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979), much of it based on Bruno’s anthropological study of a Nobel Prize-winning laboratory, was a radically novel picture of bench science and, as the subtitle advertised, ‘the construction of scientific facts’. The book displays actions on and through the scientific literature, actions on samples through the instruments of the lab, all of them contributing to cycles of investment that enabled scientists to solidify and expand the reach of their interventions.
In Science in Action (1987), Bruno reworked ideas from his own and other work in STS, and interpreted these ideas through the lens of actor-network theory – a generalized constructivism being developed by Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon, John Law, and Bruno. The book was simultaneously an imagined textbook for the new field and a bold statement of the new theory. It also articulated a huge number of smaller insights about science and technology that, because of Bruno’s clever writing and excellent eye for examples, became touchstones in the field. Even though he was later dissatisfied with the book and wished that STS had moved on from it, Science in Action continues to teach and provoke.
From Laboratory Life (1979) through Science in Action (1987), much of The Pasteurization of France (1988), and Pandora’s Hope (1999), as well as many essays along the way, Bruno focused on how technoscience constructs new facts and things and extends their reach. He introduced cheeky new ways of seeing what was and wasn’t happening: There is no action at a distance, he would say. Yet the technosciences build larger and larger networks to connect actors that are further and further apart in time, space or kind. There are no unbridgeable gaps between words and world, society and nature, mind and matter. At the same time, there are no perfect bridges.
While doing that, Bruno also started new philosophical projects in which he took the lessons we and he had learned in STS, and tackled broad historical and social formations. An early instance of this ambition was the second half of what was published in English as The Pasteurization of France. It was given the title ‘Irreductions’, and was an aphoristic exploration of insights familiar from Bruno’s other works. It is organized in a somewhat Spinozistic fashion, beginning with ‘1.1.1 − Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.’ Although less frequently cited than almost any of his other of his writings, I think that it repays revisits.
Probably best known in this line of thought is We Have Never Been Modern (1993), which understands modernity as the consistent separation of nature and culture, and challenges that. The apparent purification of nature and culture always depends on their hybridization. When I complained to Bruno at the time about the generality of his new work, in contrast to the more precise particularity of much of his earlier work, he replied that he was writing for a different audience, one that wasn’t fascinated by science and technology as we were. He was writing as a ‘philosopher’ in a more general sense and was incredibly successful writing in that vein.
This new line of thinking led Bruno in several directions: Part of it became works such as Politics of Nature (2004), which set out a vision of politics and governance for a world inhabited by increasing numbers of technoscientific nature/culture hybrids. Part of it became a general social theory, as in Reassembling the Social (2005), a rethinking of the social world through actor-network theory. And part of it became a more systematic exploration of how facts and objects are and can be introduced to the social world, as seen in his The Making of Law (2009) and the expansive An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). Even a decade later, I am still deciding whether to catch up to Bruno’s thinking in that latter book, or to wait until the dust settles.
And over the past twenty years Bruno also wrote insistently about climate change, weaving some of his many insights about science and politics into multiple books and articles on climate politics and the Anthropocene. He helped curate several art exhibitions on some of the many themes that animated him. He even tossed off a book on what we could learn from Covid restrictions.
Bruno won the Holberg Prize in 2013, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. The Holberg Prize citation concludes: ‘Latour is creative, imaginative, playful, humorous and – unpredictable, not afraid to revise his previous positions and extend his thoughts in surprising new directions. His trajectory is ongoing.’ We will miss Bruno’s next turn. We will miss being challenged by his next critical stance, perhaps on his own previous work. We will miss his exciting next provocation. We will miss the next time he finds a possible key to understanding something anew.
And we will miss the twinkle in Bruno’s eye, his genial smile, and his ability to point to something funny and to laugh with us.