A truly bewildering Wunderkammer. The collection of Bruno Latour's publications brings an early-modern cabinet of curiosities to mind. Their subject matters range from laboratory life in Nobel Prize winner Roger Guillemin's Salk Institute (LL); the shared history of microbes, microbiologists and society (PF); the tragic fate of an innovative public transport system (AR); file handling and the passage of law at the French supreme court for administrative law, the Conseil d’État (ML); geopolitics in the epoch of the Anthropocene (FG); religion (REJ); economics (SPI); ethnopsychiatry (CM); modernity (NBM, AIME); to Paris (PVI), politics (PN, MTP) and philosophy of science (SA, PH). Pick up any of Latour's books and you will be guided again through a maze of surprising connections – from the technical details of a rotary motor to meetings at the Transportation Ministry and a photo-op with French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac; from Pasteur's laboratory in Paris to a farm in Pouilly-le-Fort; from the Conseil d’État in session to its mail room and to the file folders, stamps and paperclips in a secretary's cubicle; from a dialogue between lovers to Fra Angelico's fresco of the empty tomb in Florence; or from the Salk Institute's lab benches to the hectic travel schedule of its boss on his way to meet an endless array of colleagues, firms and high-level civil servants.
What's the point? Is there any order in this confusing, rambling, seemingly boundless list of subjects, actors, institutions and places? Who's interested in a High Court secretary's office paraphernalia or in the smile on the face of a politician sitting in a prototype of a public transport system? Why doesn't Latour stick to science and technology, the study of which brought him international fame; why did he fan out to other topics? And why doesn't he take the trouble to sort the various aspects of what he's talking about into neat categories, to leave technical details to scientists and engineers, legal matters to jurists, so that social scientists can focus on organizational matters, institutional relations and politics, after which philosophers can sit down to discuss foundational and methodological issues, the crumbs that fall from the other disciplines’ dinner tables?
To find our way in the world, to understand the modern world we live in, Latour claims we have to abandon the intuitions and explanatory ideals we have been trained to hold dear. The world does not present itself in pre-packed items that nicely fit into the pigeonholes of the established scientific disciplines. An education in law may have prepared lawyers for carefully reading texts and discussing legal subtleties, but if secretaries and court-clerks run out of file folders and paperclips, court documents will get messed up, chaos will emerge and before long the process of administering justice will have come to a full stop. So if we are interested in what lawyers are doing and how justice is administered, we better start taking an interest also in such seemingly trivial material aspects of legal practice as file folders and other office paraphernalia. Is it really possible to understand anything about societies without taking technology into account? Amazingly, the topic is not covered by sociology. Pick up any sociology textbook and you will see that sociologists are trained to study human groups, institutions, cultures and maybe the impact of technology on society, but not how technology makes up a substantial part of the fabric of society. So, Latour boldly claims, to become realistic about society, sociology has to be reformed. Can one truly understand modern science if one neglects the fact that a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will have spent long days not only at his lab, in hospitals and on academic conferences, but also in meeting rooms to discuss his work with patent lawyers, representatives of pharmaceutical firms and government officials? No. So we better start rewriting the usual stories about science. Why should one respect the established boundaries of scientific disciplines if scientists themselves keep trespassing them time and again? Engineers mix with politicians for work, not for pleasure; chemists, biologists and climate scientists discuss ecological problems with government representatives who probably have been educated as economists, lawyers, or as policy analysts. Only social theorists and philosophers tend to rigidly guard the borders of their fields.
As a consequence of his lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries, Latour's work is difficult to label. No wonder bookshops find it difficult to decide where to place his books on their shelves. In Paris, you will find most of them in the Social Sciences section; in Oxford and Cambridge they are stored under History and Philosophy of Science; in Amsterdam in the Philosophy corner. His papers are published in a wide variety of journals. To locate some of his other work, you may even have to travel to a museum – to the Karlsruhe Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) where Latour has curated exhibitions, or to the Centre Pompidou in Paris where he organized a series of conferences – or to visit his website www.bruno-latour.fr to find a ‘sociological web opera’ posted next to a video of a re-staged debate between Durkheim and Tarde, with Latour impersonating the latter. The fruits of Latour's labours are not easy to categorize.
But first impressions are deceptive. What may appear as a hotchpotch of projects that lacks disciplinary rigour is driven by a clear intent, namely to describe science, law, politics, religion and other key institutions of the modern world in a new way. Latour claims that several of the established conceptual distinctions used to demarcate modern institutions – e.g. nature versus society, and facts versus values – provide at best little guidance to understanding what goes on in science, law, politics and religion and more likely will lead us astray. To articulate the nature of the world we live in, to get a more realistic view, we need to redescribe these institutions, their values and the ways in which they differ from one another. In spite of the fact that most of Latour's academic papers have been published in social science journals, this intent is sufficient reason to conceive Latour primarily as a philosopher – although one of a distinctive kind.
Traditionally, philosophers have conceived their task as finding a point on solid ground that allows a perspective on the world as it is, that is, to see reality, essences, behind confusing appearances. Plato's allegory of the cave nicely captures the ambition. In contrast to the prisoners who have been chained in a cave for all their lives, who are able only to look forward and who take the shadows cast on the wall in front of them for reality, the philosopher is like the one who is freed from his fetters, who raises and turning around is confronted with the things outside the cave that cast the shadows on the wall, and who comes to understand that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, and that now he has turned to more real things he can see more truly (Plato Republic: 7.514).
Over time, philosophers have adopted a more modest attitude. The rise of the sciences has forced them to reconsider their role. As Foucault observed:
[f]or a long time one has known that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but to make visible precisely what is visible, that is to say, to make evident what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to us, that because of that we do not perceive it. Whereas the role of science is to reveal what we do not see, the role of philosophy is to let us see what we see.
The sciences aim to inform us about what is hidden from view – e.g. what goes on in a distant star system, or in the brain of an Alzheimer patient – and to explain what we see in terms of underlying structures and processes. In contrast, philosophy tries to provide redescriptions of what is close to us: the world we live in and relate to, our social and moral intuitions, and our notions of who we are. So we may find Foucault (1979) opening our eyes for a much wider range of ways in which the conduct of a person is controlled in modern society, namely by pointing to new forms of discipline and punishment, that is, forms of power that have been around ever since about the early nineteenth century but that went unnoticed because we used to understand power only to refer to “every chance to carry through one's own will, even against resistance” (Weber 1972b [1922]: 28).
To single out redescription as the specific role for philosophy is certainly not an aberrant preference of some French philosophers alone. For example, Wittgenstein (1969 [1952]) also declared that “[w]e must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (PU §109). “We want to understand something that is already in plain view” (PU §89). The technique he suggested differs from Foucault's approach. For Wittgenstein, careful description of language is the preferred way to provide Übersichtlichkeit, a ‘perspicuous survey’ that helps to untie the knots in our understanding and to resolve philosophical perplexity. A perspicuous representation will “bring about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we ‘see the connections’.” “Hence,” he added, “the importance of finding connecting links” (Wittgenstein 1993: 132).
The similarity with Latour's intent is as remarkable as the difference. While at one point Wittgenstein (1998: 45e) wondered “if we use the ethnological approach, does that mean we are saying philosophy is ethnology?” – to further limit his attention to describing language games – Latour rose from his armchair to grab the bull by its horns. To do philosophy, to actually trace the connecting links and to learn to see what we see, Latour got engaged in empirical field studies, in ethnography.
Latour's intent and approach to philosophy may become clearer by discussing what at first sight is the most un-philosophical book he has ever published, Paris ville invisible (1998), co-authored with photographer Emilie Hermant. Because of its title and design – hundreds of photos of Parisian sites, with text interspersed, printed in a coffee table format – to acquire this book you may have to go to the travel section of a Parisian bookshop, where you may find it next to glossy books about romantic Paris and the Guide Michelin. But the rushed tourist who has picked up the book on his way home will likely be disappointed when he unwraps his souvenir. He has bought a treatise on philosophy and social theory. Discovering that the book was later turned into an interactive website will probably add to his chagrin.
In Paris ville invisible, the grandiose task of attaining Übersicht, of perspicuously surveying the world as a whole, is reduced to the more mundane one of capturing the whole of Paris at a glance. Where do we have to go to accomplish the task of perspicuously representing Paris? From which fetters do we have to free ourselves? Do we have to escape from the Earth, to get a view of the whole of Paris from a satellite? When we look at the image offered by Google Earth, we may indeed see ‘the whole of Paris’ at a glance. But except for the word ‘Paris’ being superimposed on the picture on our screen, we might easily have taken it to depict any other city. On the scale that captures Paris as a whole, the trained eye may spot the curves of the Seine, but very little else. So we may decide to take another tack, to go to Paris to join Latour and Hermant on their visit to the Samaritaine, the department store near Pont Neuf, which – before it was closed in 2005 for security reasons – proudly advertised itself with the slogan “You can find anything at the Samaritaine”. On the top floor of the old store was a panorama. One could see a lot of Paris from this spot. Binoculars were available for visitors and there was a huge circular table with engraved arrows pointing to Parisian landmarks drawn in perspective to help orientation. So is this the place where one might see the whole of Paris?
Unfortunately, no. As Hermant's photos show, smog from exhaust fumes veils the view. Moreover, the panorama fails to locate the Centre Pompidou and the impressive architecture of La Défense, and where the panorama promises tree-covered hills to be visible in the northeast, as Latour and Hermant note, one vaguely sees only endlessly more buildings. Set up in the 1930s, the panorama no longer corresponds to the city that spreads out before us. So, in spite of the available binoculars on the top-floor of the Samaritaine, Latour and Hermant suggest that to really see the Sacré Coeur, we had better get the metro to Montmartre.
On arrival at metro station Abbesses, however, another disappointment waits for us. Once we have left the station, we get lost in the maze of little streets in Montmartre. Where are we? The answer comes from the Michelin map of Paris that we have been carrying around. We look at the nearest road sign – it reads ‘Rue la Vieuville’ – and soon we have found the same words on the Michelin map. Now we know where we are. On the map, we have the entire eighteenth arrondisement at a glance. A minute later we know how to walk to the basilica. However, we also suddenly realize that by further unfolding the map, we can have the whole of Paris at a glance! Plato was wrong. To see the whole of Paris at a glance, we need to divert our attention away from the city, away from reality, and to look at the map. To take it all in at once, to see it at a glance, to see its structure, Paris first had to become small. What we set out to see – the whole of Paris – we have been carrying around all day in our pocket.
That is, provided a lot of work has already been done. We could find the place where we got lost only because the mapmakers at Michelin meticulously did their job and because the Paris municipality's road-maintenance service has taken the trouble to attach a nameplate to the wall. How did the road-maintenance service personnel know which plate should be attached to this particular wall? Obviously, they too had a map. Another official department, the Service Parcellaire, which keeps a detailed record of all cadastral data, has provided it. When we join Latour and Hermant to visit the Service Parcellaire at Boulevard Morland, we learn that it gets its information from the Service Technique de la Documentation Foncière, the Ordinance Survey Department, which hires small teams of surveyors to carefully measure the dense fabric of Paris and which gets the official names of streets, once they have been approved by the mayor of Paris, from the Service de la Nomenclature.
Our little excursion has taught us a profound philosophical lesson. Paris, reality, cannot be captured at a glance from a single, exclusive point, but the efforts of cartographers, technicians and civil servants, make it visible. Their coordinated efforts materialize the conditions that will allow documents, such as a map, to apply to the world, thus helping those concerned to find their way around to know where they are, and to see what they are seeing. If a philosopher sets out “to make visible precisely what is visible”, he has to trace the long cascade of activities and techniques that enable us to see what we see. Step by step they have transformed the terra incognita we have been plunged in – what in Paris ville invisible Latour calls the ‘plasma’ – into an ordered reality, while simultaneously delivering the means to represent, to map, its order. What was left for the mapmakers at Michelin to do was carefully to translate the official maps that resulted from the coordinated work of several municipal services into a format suitable for tourists to read and to carry around. Without these services, the Michelin mapmakers too would get lost.
Once we have digested this lesson, we will soon find out that there exist numerous ways of making Paris visible. There are multiple Parises within Paris. So let us join Latour and Hermant for another tour. At SAGEP the water supply is controlled. Computers survey the intake and consumption of fresh water. A lot of data need to be processed. But in spite of what the Latin word ‘data’ suggests, these data are not given, but need to be obtained. Sensors duly record the water flows, but to indicate where leakages may have occurred their readings need to be processed and compared to normal values. Because water will spend on average six hours in the system before being consumed, it is also necessary to anticipate demand. Statistics and weather reports help to predict upcoming consumption. SAGEP also knows that at the end of an European Cup football match, thousands of toilets will be flushed almost simultaneously. To control the water supply of a big city not only requires processing data from a lot of pipes, pumps and sluices, but also sociological insight into the habits of the population.
Similarly, traffic controllers, market researchers, statistical bureaux, all rely on techniques to obtain data and to translate them into images on a scale that fits the screen of a computer or a sheet of paper. All of them make Parisian lives possible and visible at the same time. Where would you find ‘the market’ if it wasn't made possible to compare the prices of commodities? Somebody has to collect and process them for you, to make visible what ‘the market’ is doing. Even local supermarkets contribute to this task by carefully arranging products on their shelves and by making the price and the content of products visible so that clients can make comparisons before loading their shopping carts. There is no market without devices that make what's on the market visible.
Okay, one may think, this may perhaps apply to social reality and technology, but surely not to the natural world? It takes little effort to realize that technologies like the water supply system are constructed. And because social facts require human agreement and institutions for their existence, the same goes for acknowledging that the building blocks of social reality are constructed. But surely, natural facts are ‘brute facts’ that require no human institution for their existence. Of course, to state a brute fact requires the institution of language, but the fact stated needs to be distinguished from the statement of it (Searle 1995: 2). One should not confuse the map with the territory. In contrast to social facts, brute, natural facts – say the fact that the sun is 150 million kilometres from the Earth – existed long before any human being appeared on Earth. It would be strange to think that in this case human construction work would be involved.
Alas, it's more complicated. Join Latour and Hermant for yet another trip, this time to the biology department of the École de Physique et Chimie de Paris. Here, Dr Audinat has managed to make visible the activity of a single neuron in a rat's brain. ‘Molecular and Physiological Diversity of Cortical Nonpyramidal Cells’, the paper in the Journal of Neuroscience in which he and seven colleagues have published their results (Cauli et al. 1997), carefully documents all the steps that were necessary to do the job. On one of its pages, a photo showing a neuron – a ‘layer V FS cell’ – is juxtaposed with a graph of its electric potential and a photograph of an electrophoresis gel that bears the marks of molecules synthesized by this neuron. We see the anatomy, the electric potential and the molecular biochemistry of a neuron at a glance – that is, if we read the explanation of the pictures published on the bottom of the page and in the body of the article.
To produce these pictures has required a lot of preparatory work. A rat had to be decapitated, its brain extracted; fine slices of the brain had to be cut with a microtome; these slices had to be framed before being put under an infrared microscope and searching through all of them, a neuron had to be identified. Once this had been achieved, microelectrodes were brought into contact with the cell to obtain the electric potential and to read its electric activity from an oscilloscope. At the end of the recording, the content of the cell was aspirated in a micropipette, transferred to another laboratory, and prepared for introduction into a PCR-machine to obtain the molecular biochemistry of the neurotransmitters. At this point Audinat and his colleagues have obtained their data – which, again, were not ‘given’, but obviously required a lot of work and skill to be produced. They have finally succeeded in making the activity of a rat's neuron visible. Does their paper refer to the activity of a neuron in a rat's brain? Do the results truly represent events in a rat's brain? Yes, after carefully reading the article the readers of the Journal of Neuroscience will be convinced they do – as have been the referees who had to evaluate the paper before the journal's editor decided to publish a second version, revised on the basis of the referees’ comments. So, did Audinat and his colleagues state ‘brute’ facts? To accept that they did, we have to ignore all the steps they had to take to produce the facts they state in their paper – some quite brutal indeed, like decapitating animals. Obviously, to do so they had to rely on much more than language alone. They had to carefully prepare rat-neurons to make their activity visible and representable. To understand what it means ‘to refer to’ the activity of a neuron, ‘to represent’ the facts, we have to follow all the links that the group has established in their research – just as we have to understand all the work that the various services had to perform before the Michelin map of Paris became a reliable guide for finding one's way through Paris, and to grasp all the efforts that had to be undertaken before SAGEP knows the current status of the water supply in the complicated system of pipes and sluices it oversees.
In Paris ville invisible we encounter Latour in action. Visiting an amazingly varied collection of sites, he interviews the people he encounters on his way, always curious to learn the minute details of their work, the way their work is linked to that of others, and the ways they handle, compare, and translate the information they receive in the form of documents, instrument readings, graphs, or in whatever shape it happens to arrive in their offices, into a form suitable to their own purposes. He carefully listens to their accounts of what is going on, the technical and organizational problems they have to cope with, and the alternatives that may have existed but which they did choose not to follow. He is engaged in ethnographic fieldwork, in empirical, anthropological research – not of some remote tribe on some Pacific island, but of the people working at SAGEP, a biochemistry laboratory in Paris or in California, the French High Court for administrative law, or at any other site that might have attracted his curiosity.
While scribbling observations in his unreadable handwriting in little notebooks, to be transposed later to other notebooks, to finally find their way into the case studies that populate his work, Latour simultaneously answers some of the key questions of philosophy. From which point can we see the true structure of reality? Wrong, badly framed question. There is no such point, but nevertheless we may study how reality is made visible. How do you know that the pictures that are eventually produced correspond to reality? Again, wrong, badly framed question. The pictures that are produced do not correspond to reality, but to other pictures. If for whatever reason a problem arises, Michelin will first check its maps against the ones produced by the Service Parcellaire. If the Michelin mapmakers find no fault, they will inform this service, which again will first check its own records. If the Service Parcellaire finds its records to be in order, it will inform the Service Technique de la Documentation Foncière, which ultimately may decide to send out a fresh team of geodesians to re-measure the site and to draw a new map, which will be processed all the way up to the mapmakers at Michelin, who will dutifully issue a new edition of their map. But aren't we in this way confusing the map with the territory? Again wrong question. It suggests that we are dealing only with an epistemological issue, that is an issue about the knowledge supposedly contained in a map or a research paper. The real issue lies on the other side of the equation. Epistemologists tend to think much too naively about ‘reality’. They conceive it as something given, out-there, as a territory waiting to be discovered and to be mapped. However, as we have just seen, it takes a whole array of preparatory actions to make reality visible, measurable and to interact with it. To observe the activity of neurons in rats’ brains, Dr Audinat didn't passively watch an animal, but decapitated a rat to meticulously prepare slices of its brain to make a neuron's activity visible. What we're primarily dealing with when trying to understand what scientists – or mapmakers for that matter – are involved in, are first of all ontological questions, that is to say questions about what, and in what way, something has to be, before it can properly be called ‘objective’, ‘visible reality’. Before a scientific paper, a document, a map can refer to something out-there, to reality, reality has to be transformed from a terra incognita, from a ‘plasma’, to a territory that is made visible. To ‘passively’ observe facts one has first to ‘actively’ invest in reality (Fleck 1979 [1935]). But philosophers of science surely must have been aware that setting up a scientific enquiry involves a lot of work, haven't they? Indeed. Of course, they knew this. But once they started to writing up their accounts of what makes scientific knowledge great, they seem to have forgotten this. How come? – We'll get to that later.
This is what Latour is up to: while filling up his little notebooks, he is replacing epistemological questions that have dominated most of the philosophical tradition by ontological ones. And in contrast to most philosophers of the past who engaged their inquiries in an armchair, to answer his philosophical questions Latour goes out to do ethnographical research. For want of a better name, we may call him an ‘empirical philosopher’. Neglect his empirical work and you will completely lose his philosophy; disregard the philosophical intent and you will be bogged down in a bewildering set of disparate books and papers.
It took quite some time before Latour decided to come out as a philosopher.
Born in 1947 in Beaune (France), in a family that has owned Maison Louis Latour since 1789, world-famous growers and merchants of the finest Burgundy wines, Bruno Latour left the future of the wine-business to his brother to attend Jesuit school and the University of Dijon for a master’s degree. In 1972 he gained a First in the agrégation de philosophie (a national exam). In Ivory Coast, while engaging in ‘cooperation’, a sort of French Peace Corps, an alternative available at the time for military service, he completed his thèse de troisième siècle (PhD) Exégèse et Ontologie (1975, l’Université de Tours). It includes a close reading of Clio, dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne, an abstruse work of the poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Péguy that provided the material for ‘Les raisons profondes du style répétitif de Péguy’, a paper he gave to the Péguy centennial conference in 1973. It was published in 1977 as ‘Pourquoi Péguy se répète-t-il? Péguy est-il illisible?’ – ‘Why does Péguy repeat himself? Is Péguy unreadable?’ – his first academic paper. In 1987 he obtained the habilitation à la direction des recherches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, a second PhD.
Ivory Coast got Latour on the road to ethnography. Invited to contribute to a study on the problems encountered when replacing white executives with local, black Ivory Coast managers, Latour decided to study how ‘competence’ was conceived in the industrial milieus of Abidjan. Based on extensive, two to three hours interviews with about 130 persons, assisted by Amina Shabou, Latour identified the discourses about competence of four distinct groups: European executives and lower middle-class whites; black Ivory Coast executives; directors of big multinational corporations; and black workers. Speaking in terms of ‘race’, the ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ of the native population, or in terms of features like ‘courage’, ‘talent’, and ‘bad faith’, the first two groups were found to offer accounts of the ‘African mind’ to explain why the black population was still not up to managing modern industrial enterprises. These accounts, however, suffered from one problem, Latour observed. They provided explanations for a fact that was far from evident. Although there was an abundance of anecdotes (conveyed in the same discourse), statistical data about native incompetence were non-existent. And when interviewing directors of multinational firms, Latour found this group to conceive competence primarily as a matter of proper recruitment, training and management. Instead of referring to the ‘African mind’ of the local population, the higher levels of the Abidjan business community talked about ‘organization charts’, ‘proper stimulation’ and ‘promotions’. So, if there was incompetence among Ivory Coast workers at all, with the proper means, perhaps it could be overcome. Latour therefore turned his attention to education. Interviewing white teachers, he noted again complaints about the features of the ‘African mind’ that prevented African pupils from meeting ‘French levels of competence’. For example, he found teachers at the Lycée Technique in Abidjan reporting their pupils to be unable to read technical drawings as representing three-dimensional objects, obviously a serious deficiency for future technicians. When he interviewed the pupils and started looking into school practices, however, Latour found a much simpler explanation. The school system (an exact copy of the French system) introduced engineering before students had done any practical work on engines. Since most of the pupils had never seen or handled an engine before, it was not surprising that the interpretation of technical drawings presented them with quite a puzzle. The cause of the problems the students had with reading technical drawings was not their ‘African mind’, but the lack of appropriate connections required to interpret such drawings. Exporting the French school system to Africa without exporting the many links to engines that French pupils have established even before entering school, made boys in Abidjan ‘incompetent’.
Latour had made a small but significant move. What had started as a rather dull sociological enquiry, and halfway through might have turned into a 1970s style critique of ideology and critical social science, suddenly had become quite another kind of enterprise. Competence is not a state of mind that precedes successful action, Latour concluded in Les idéologies de la compétence en milieu industriel à Abidjan, the report in which he and Shabou (1974) describe their findings. Competence is not some hidden, given mental entity. One is competent if one controls a system – a machine, an organization, a flow of documents – from beginning to end, that is, if one has the information and the resources ready to adapt and to act capably, that is: if one knows what to do next. Competence should be analysed as set of links, as a network of connections that provides a key for what to do next, for further action.
In Ivory Coast, Latour's empirical research programme took off. However, the crucial move that led him to conclude that ‘competence’ should not be conceived in mental and cultural terms but in terms of a set of links, Latour had already anticipated in philosophical terms. In 1972, before leaving France for Ivory Coast, Latour had taught for a short time at a lycée in Gray, on the borders of Franche-Comté and Burgundy. As he was to recount in The Pasteurization of France (1988), one day at the end of autumn, on his way from Dijon to Gray, he was forced to stop, “brought to my senses after an overdose of reductionism”. “I […] simply repeated to myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’ ” (PF: 162–3). In Ivory Coast, he applied this ‘irreductionist’ principle. Instead of reducing the (supposed) lack of competence of blacks workers to their ‘African mind’, Latour redescribed what competence is in terms of links, alliances. In Ivory Coast, he started to do philosophy with empirical means.
After having defended his PhD thesis at the University of Tours in 1975, Latour continued on the empirical path. The endocrinologist Roger Guillemin had generously allowed Latour to spend two years (1975–77) at the Salk Institute, San Diego, to study the competences of scientists in a biochemistry laboratory. The lead question of the empirical work Latour would do in California came straight out of his work in Africa: what would happen if the field methods used to study Ivory Coast pupils and workers were applied to first-rate scientists? Laboratory Life – The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, the book based on his fieldwork in San Diego, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, was published in 1979.
Latour had met Woolgar in 1976 at the first conference the Society for the Social Study of Science organized and had invited him to come to visit the Salk Institute. Woolgar opened up a new resource for Latour, ethnomethodology, the study of the accounts people give of their lives to make sense of their actions and relations and to organize their everyday life. Developed by Garfinkel (1984 [1967]), the approach basically consists in asking people a very simple question – ‘what are you doing?’ – and – much more difficult – to systematically refrain from offering descriptions and explanations of actions in terms of the schemes taught in social theory classes. Ethnomethodology shifts the attention of social science away from questions about explanations, that is, questions about why something happens, to ontological ones, that is, questions about what is going on. Latour discovered that he had been practising ethnomethodology for years. This was the approach he had used when interviewing schoolboys and black workers in Abidjan, and this was the question that – not being versed in science – he was raising when meeting the scientists at the Salk laboratory to make sense of what was going on.
Laboratory Life was widely received as a publication in the emerging discipline of ‘social studies of science’. Latour was included in the ranks of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr-Cetina, John Law, Mike Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Steven Shapin and a dozen other Young Turks who had decided to turn their backs on established logical-empiricist philosophy of science to take ‘a social turn’, that is, to study the sciences empirically, by sociological and ethnographical methods. Although there had been sociologists who had studied science as an institution before, it had taken Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – originally published in 1962, but more explicitly in its second, enlarged edition (Kuhn 1970) – to provide the basis for the conception of the social character of scientific knowledge. ‘Social studies of science’ set out to fill in the details by providing an avalanche of sociological studies of scientific controversies and ethnographies of modern laboratories. The way controversies were closed and scientific facts became established was explained not by referring to the available evidence and methodological rules, but in terms of social causes and processes.
Few realized at that time that Latour was on a different trajectory than most of his colleagues in science studies, who self-consciously framed themselves as sociologists, and who were proud not to be philosophers. In fact, Latour doesn't seem to have been aware of the difference himself. It would take several years before he started to deny explicitly that, like the others, he was out to provide sociological explanations for scientific knowledge and technological artefacts. Perhaps Les Microbes, published with a philosophy-heavy second part, Irréductions, in 1984, should have rung some bells, but it was almost completely neglected until The Pasteurization of France, its English translation, became available in 1988. To most non-Francophones, the 1986 postscript to the second edition of Laboratory Life first indicated the upcoming differences. In sections with titles such as ‘How Radical is Radical?’, ‘The Place of Philosophy’, and ‘The Demise of the ‘Social’, Latour and Woolgar boldly set out why they had omitted the term ‘social’ from the new edition's subtitle. They pointed out that by explaining the construction of scientific facts in terms of social causes or processes, social study of science – while proclaiming the need to demystify realist epistemology among natural scientists – had un-reflexively adopted a realist attitude for its own work and had naively misunderstood the nature of ethnography (LL2: 273–286). In heated exchanges in the 1990s first with Collins and Yearley (Collins and Yearley 1992; Callon and Latour 1992; De Vries 1995) and later with Bloor (Bloor 1999a; 1999b; Latour 1999a), the gap between Latour and the social studies of science community widened.
To mark the contrast, Latour decided to adopt ‘actor-network theory’, a name suggested by Michel Callon and John Law, as the battle cry for his approach to follow and to describe the work that goes into making reality – what is – visible. To bluntly call his work ‘philosophy’ was apparently still a bridge too far. In later years he would deeply regret this decision since it utterly misnamed what the approach is up to: “There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!” (Latour 1999b). Eventually, however, he decided to accept the name because it is “so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept” (RAS: 9).
In 1982, Latour had joined economist and sociologist of technology Michel Callon at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, one of France's top engineering schools, for what would become a fruitful co-operation lasting almost 25 years. With no administrative duties and a relatively low teaching load – one class of engineering students on Fridays and a biweekly seminar for CSI's PhD students – Latour could devote his full energies to writing about scientific practice, technology, and eventually a much wider variety of subjects. His rapidly growing international fame in science studies led to visiting professorships at the University of California at San Diego, Harvard's History of Science department, and the London School of Economics, to several honorary doctorates, and to invitations to teach in universities from Melbourne to São Paulo, all over Europe and in the US. In the 1990s, Latour started to apply the approach and the lessons learned in science studies to other subjects: art, law, politics, religion, and the ecological problems the world faces. In 1991, arguing that we fundamentally misunderstand the modern condition we live in, he published a radical and to many readers puzzling philosophical essay, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes – We have never been modern (NBM).
For a long time, Latour was more famous outside France than in Paris. Being at odds both with main currents in French philosophy and with French social science, and his work for a long time being almost exclusively devoted to science and technology – a subject most French intellectuals take little interest in – it took quite some time before the excellence of his work was recognized in France. Only a few heterodox French scholars – including Boltanski, Thévenot, and Descola – incorporated some of Latour's ideas in their own work. This gradually changed in the early 2000s. In 2006, Latour left the École Nationale Supérieures des Mines to become professor at Sciences Po, a prestigious (private) political and social science university in Paris, where he was elected vice-president of research a few months later. A weeklong meeting at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2007, on the occasion of Latour's sixtieth birthday, may mark his full acceptance in France as a philosopher. In rooms lined with photos of earlier Cerisy-meetings with towering figures of continental philosophy – including Heidegger, Sartre, Bachelard, and Foucault – about 100 people gathered to discuss with Latour the draft of a new work. The topic: ‘exercises in empirical metaphysics’. The ambition: to summarize the enquiry Latour had been pursuing for decades and to answer the question positively of what characterizes the current situation in the West, that is, to answer the question that baffled many readers of We Have Never Been Modern: if we are ‘not modern’, what makes the civilization that brought us – among other things – the institutions of science, modern law and democracy stand out? Published in French in 2012 and in English a year later (AIME), the book was well received in France.
In 2013, Latour was awarded the prestigious Holberg memorial prize for his ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and for challenging modernity's fundamental concepts. As the Holberg Prize academic committee noted, by then “[h]is influence has been felt internationally and well beyond the social study of science, in history, art history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, theology, literature and legal studies”.
With hindsight, we may find that Latour did not come completely unprepared to Ivory Coast to enter on the course that would lead him to do philosophy with ethnographic means and to get engaged in ‘exercises in empirical metaphysics’.
In one of his rare autobiographical writings, Latour (2010a) recounts that at the University of Dijon he had the good luck of befriending André Malet, a former Catholic priest who had become a university professor and Protestant pastor. Under Malet's guidance, Latour discovered biblical exegesis. Malet had just finished the French translation of Rudolf Bultmann's Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, originally published in 1921, but still one of the standard texts of New Testament exegesis.
To enable modern readers to appreciate the Gospel, Bultmann, a Lutherian theologian, had decided to de-mystify the New Testament by close reading, using a method he called ‘form-criticism’. Form-criticism aims to identify secondary additions to determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying, or a parable. By eliminating step-by-step the elements and language later interlocutors had added, Bultmann eventually identified a limited number of sentences in Aramaic that could be genuinely attributed to a certain ‘Joshua of Nazareth’, the historical Jesus. By eliminating the later mythical additions, Bultmann hoped to open up the Gospel to modern, rationalized readers, wary of abstruse elements.
Bultmann introduced the notion of an evolving network of connections to Latour. Latour, however, suggested an alternative reading of the corpus. While Bultmann had proceeded by subtracting everything that couldn't genuinely attributed to the historical Jesus, Latour decided to emphasize the importance of the links that had been added. This led him to suggest the exact opposite of Bultmann's conclusion, namely that “only in the long chain of continuous inventions [by later interlocutors] the truth conditions of the Gospel resided – provided that is, that those inventions were done, so to speak, in the right key” (Latour 2010a: 600). In a way, he commented in 2010, “I had taken the poison out of Bultmann and transformed his critical acid into the best proof we had that it is possible to obtain truth (religious truth, that is) through an immense number of mediations provided that each link was renewing the message in the ‘right manner’.” The question that remained to be answered was how to define this ‘right manner’ precisely enough, that is “how to discriminate between two opposite types of betrayal – betrayal by mere repetition and the absence of innovation, and betrayal by too many innovations and the loss of the initial intent” (Latour 2010a: 600).
Close reading of Péguy's Clio, “the topic and manner of which was precisely on the question of good and bad repetition” (Latour 2010a: 600), suggested an answer. In his 1975 thèse and his subsequent 1977 paper ‘Why does Péguy repeat himself? Is Péguy unreadable?’, Latour analysed Péguy's “unceasing digressions, these monstrous paragraphs, these violent accelerations” (Latour 1977: 79), indeed Péguy's “illegibility”, as exerting a calculated effect. “Repetition is the engine of war invented by Péguy to combat refrain and nagging” (Latour 1977: 80), to force the reader to break away from his habit of ‘horizontally’ reading a text. Persuaded to read the text over and over again, a new, ‘vertical’ dimension emerges. “Repetition cajoles being into time, whereas refrain crushes time in being” (Latour 1977: 80). Péguy's Clio does not speak about things, but about their movement, not about phenomena, but about what creates them. “In this work temporality personified [by Clio, in Greek mythology the muse of history] speaks about temporality and about a great many other things, which do not appear to be connected except by the association of words, but are connected nevertheless because she [Clio] applies that of which she speaks. Thus, through an incredible concentration the structure, the theme, and the style coincide to reveal the machinery of time” (Latour 1977: 81). Péguy's style, Latour concluded, has a non-stylistic basis. This led Latour to subsequently analyse Péguy's much discussed Catholicism. Again his style, rather than his use of religious concepts, is emphasized. “With Péguy's repetition, each person hears the Word in their own language; repetition renews the work of Whitsun” (Latour 1977: 93). For Latour, Péguy is not a prophet in the banal sense of the word, not someone who refers to God up there or to the Second Coming of Christ to talk about the Gospel, but nothing less than a new evangelist, “the one who brings the Glad Tidings of the loss of former dispositions, the good news of past events, of the perennial openness of the Event” (Latour 1977: 94).
It is tempting to think of Latour's encounter with the work of Bultmann in his years as a young student and his subsequent analysis of Péguy's Clio as unveiling the origin of his later work, including his work in science studies. In fact, there are good reasons to do so. In Laboratory Life, Bultmann is explicitly mentioned (LL: 169, 188 n.10) and Schmidgen (2011; 2013) has argued that a technique similar to the one used to analyse Clio has guided Latour's analysis of what goes on in a laboratory. Also in his later works, Latour would time and again return to Péguy (PF: 51; IRR: 1.2.6; REJ: 72; AIME: 249, 306; Latour and Howles 2015).
As he observed, looking back in 2013,
[w]hat is certain is that I emerged from that formative period armed with total but somewhat paradoxical confidence about the fact that the more a layer of texts is interpreted, transformed, taken up anew, stitched back together, replayed, and rewoven, each time in a different way, the more likely it is to manifest the truth it contains – on condition (this is the part I retained for later use) that one knows how to distinguish it from a different mode of truth, pure and perfect information […]. A long struggle against the eradication of mediations was about to begin.
Latour had detected what he would fight against for all his career: the idea that information flows effortlessly, that truth does not require work – an idea he would polemically call in his later work (e.g. AIME: 93), alluding to the computer mouse, ‘double click’ communication.
However, the temptation to see all of Latour's later work as just an extension of his early work in biblical exegesis and his theological interpretation of Péguy should be handled with care. When Latour claims that religious truth is obtained through an immense number of mediations rather than residing in the few sentences that Bultmann succeeded to attribute to the historical Jesus, it would be quite paradoxical to claim that the true message of Latour's work resides in ideas he expressed as a young man. If we want to understand Latour's philosophy, we too have to follow his movements, rather than to try reconstructing the ‘origins’ of his work. It would be superficial to think that Latour's ‘empirical philosophy’ is biblical exegesis writ large, or to locate its origin in Latour's moment of epiphany on the road from Dijon to Gray. His ‘empirical philosophy’ took shape and substance in his moves, in ethnographical studies, in the debates he got involved in, and in the way he incorporated ideas from a wide variety of sources in his work. Empirical philosophy, too, exists because of the many links that have been assembled; not because some idea sparked in the mind of an agregé de philosophie in his early twenties.
The usual trick when interpreting a philosopher of citing ‘origins’ and ‘context’ should therefore be resisted. What makes Latour's work stand out is his style of doing ‘empirical philosophy’. Like Péguy's Clio, Latour “applies that of which he speaks”. Concepts are introduced as tools and discarded when more useful ones are found; precursors in philosophy and social science are pragmatically introduced to help convey the message. When writers with better ideas and concepts are found, former ones are kindly invited to leave the stage. There are numerous references to other thinkers in Latour's writings – to Austin, Deleuze, Dewey, James, Kant, Nietzsche, Serres, Sloterdijk, Souriau, Spinoza, Stengers and Whitehead, to Foucault, Habermas and Heidegger and to non-philosophers like Braudel, Garfinkel, Greimas, Tarde, Tolstoy and Tournier – but the usual intellectual stratagem of tracing influences and spotting differences and resemblances is of little use most of the time. When Latour conducts detailed exegesis of former thinkers and writers (e.g. of Serres, Souriau, Whitehead and Tarde), he discusses them to make his own points. The ultimate test is whether their work and ideas help to enrich ethnographic fieldwork and to let us better see what we see. Due to the movement of his work, the delight of minutiae it exposes, and the light-heartedness of the style of most of his writings, like Hemingway's Paris, Latour's philosophy is ‘a moveable feast’. To get acquainted with it, we better start to follow his moves.