Social studies of science developed in the 1980s as an academic discipline against a backdrop of public concerns about science, technology and the role of expertise in democracy. To better understand the cognitive authority attributed to science and the interactions between science, technology and society, sociologists of science set out to study ‘science in context’ (Barnes and Edge 1982).
But what is the ‘context’ of science? For sociologists, the answer may be obvious: ‘society’. However, this is far from undisputable. For centuries, it had been claimed that what characterizes science is precisely that it produces objective, de-contextualized knowledge, that is, knowledge the validity of which can be decided independently of when, where and by whom it was developed. Although after Kuhn this claim had to be nuanced, still it doesn't follow that ‘society’ is the proper ‘context’ in which to understand science. For Kuhn, to contextually understand science meant relating the achievements of contemporary scientists to the science of their predecessors and to social processes internal to science, not to ‘society’.
Even if we grant sociologists that it might be interesting to study science in the context of ‘society’, what exactly are we talking about? When it came to listing societal conditions that might help explain the development and nature of scientific knowledge, in spite of their radical epistemological programme, social studies of science fell back on the standard repertoire of mainstream sociology to cite the usual suspects: interests, power, ideologies, and institutional structures. In The Pasteurization of France (1988), Latour argues that in taking such ‘social facts’ for granted, the sociologists of knowledge showed too little ambition. To understand the role of science in society, Latour claims, we need not only to rethink science, but also to redefine society and sociology.
The Pasteurization of France, an adapted translation of Les Microbes (1985), explicitly situates itself in the emerging discipline of sociology of scientific knowledge. The first part of the book is a historical-sociological study of Pasteur's role in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. But soon the study turns on sociology itself. “If sociology wishes to be the science of ‘social facts’, then it cannot understand this period” (PF: 40). Recapitulating his ideas in philosophical terms in the second part of the book, Latour provides an explicit ontology – a conceptualization of what the world and society is. To formulate, defend and reformulate this ontology and its consequences for social science would become a main concern for Latour for the years to come.
The Pasteurization of France takes as its starting point the fact that in France and elsewhere Pasteur is honoured as an undisputable genius who revealed the medical and economic potential of experimental biology, who changed agricultural, veterinarian, and bio-industrial practices, revolutionized public health, made cities habitable and by achieving all of this helped to substantially increase standards of living. How is it possible that one man has such immense influence? What made Pasteur great? Or do we completely misunderstand his role and that of his science when we attribute this power to him? These are the questions Latour wants to answer in the first part of The Pasteurization of France. The subtitle of that first part – War and Peace of Microbes – hints at what inspired his approach: Tolstoy's (2010 [1869]) great novel War and Peace.
Tolstoy's War and Peace narrates the story of how the individual lives of the members of five Russian aristocratic families became entangled with history when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. But War and Peace is not just a novel, and still less a historical chronicle. The novel deals with what in the words of C. Wright Mills (1999 [1967]: 31–32) the social sciences are all about, namely “[…] to help us understand biography and history, and the connection between the two in a variety of social structures.” In an epilogue, struggling with the concept of ‘free will’, Tolstoy tried – not very successfully – to outline a programme that would do for history what the Copernican revolution had done for astronomy. In fact, what he was after was already implied in his novel. Tolstoy's style and his numerous reflections inserted in War and Peace provide substantial answers to the key-questions of the social sciences: ‘What can one man do?’, ‘What is history?’ and ‘How to write history?’
How should we write history? With the advantage of hindsight, with a bird's eye view, a historian can start off by presenting the ‘historical context’ of the events about which he wants to write. He may also observe that while at a certain place actions took place, ‘meanwhile’, elsewhere, events happened that changed the context. But real-time actors don't have this advantage. Narrating the individual lives of his characters, if in time or space distant events or conditions play a role, a novelist has to introduce such events and conditions into the scenes of his story. Tolstoy does so, for example, by having a character recalling something from the past or by injecting his characters with commonplace ideas and clichés. And to signal that important events have occurred elsewhere, he introduces a messenger arriving at the scene to deliver the news about these events. But memory and clichés are not very reliable sources, whereas the news the messenger brings may be only a rumour, or may have been made up for showing off. Thus, in real-time, if ‘context’ plays a role, it is always bound up with uncertainties and mixed up with other concerns that require attention. So, in the opening scene of War and Peace, we find its main characters attending one of St Peterburg's famous soirées, being engaged in civilized conversations about politics, career moves and personal connections, the upcoming fête at the English ambassador's residence, rumours from France, the beauty of the ladies and the uniforms of men, all on a par. At this time (1805) in Russia, Napoleon is a subject for amusing stories and war a topic for civilized discussion; ‘history’ is still far away, at a distance.
What is history? For Tolstoy, the novelist, ‘history’ is neither a sequence of actions or events, nor social structures imposing their force on the lives of individuals. It is a series of infringements of the course of life; history appears when people are confronted with a novelty that affects their existence. Any such infringement will incite uncertainties. What has happened? Is it a rumour or a fact? What is going to happen? How will it affect us? Everybody suffers from lack of oversight; misunderstanding and misinformation are abundant on both personal levels and with regard to what is happening in the world at large. While a young lady may quietly wonder whether the man in the gorgeous uniform who has just entered the room will be her future fiancé, and an ambitious young man may try to persuade somebody to arrange for him a meeting with some important figure who might further his career, rumours from Paris are discussed and speculations about their significance burgeon.
Uncertainty reigns not only in these elite circles, convened at a soirée. Tolstoy shows that commanding army officers, including Napoleon and his Russian counterparts, are also fumbling in the dark. When the French and Russian troops got engaged in what was to become the battle near Borodino, both Napoleon and his Russian counterparts erred in locating the exact positions of the enemy. Of course, they had discussed strategy and designed grandiose plans for attacks. But their strategies were based on unreliable information and if they had been executed as planned, they probably would not have attained the intended effect. Surely, with pomp and gusto Napoleon played the role of ‘Napoleon’, the genius who is in charge and who knows exactly what he is doing, the hero of future history books. But Tolstoy shows that the orders generals sent out to their troops were frequently either misunderstood, or no longer appropriate to the situation – for example because the situation had completely changed as the enemy had unexpectedly decided to execute some actions of its own before the orders had arrived at the front. In fact, the orders may even not have arrived at their destination because the officer who had to deliver them got lost in the fog or was shot on his way. So, once the fighting had started, with tremendous loss of human lives, ‘strategies’ had to be adapted, redesigned, or discarded, again and again.
So, what can one man do? The truth is: very little on his own. Tolstoy shows that men act in uncertainty and that it is often unclear who is doing the action – what is horse and what is cart and whether the horse is before the cart, or the cart before the horse. Moreover, the narrative shows that a multitude of actors has to be taken into account. While senior officers were engaged in factional conflicts about strategy, the troops were not only fighting the enemy, but also had to deal with fog, snow, ice, diseases and the sheer vastness of Russia.
Tolstoy concludes that if we find in the accounts given us by historians successes explained by the ingenuity, power or virtue of leaders, and wars and battles by their conforming to previously prescribed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that these accounts are not true. ‘Power’, ‘virtue’ and ‘genius’ are useless as explanatory concepts. Instead, they are the explananda, the phenomena to be explained.
This sets the road Latour will follow in The Pasteurization of France.
It takes Tolstoy some eight hundred pages to give back to the multitude the effectiveness that historians of his century placed in the virtue or genius of a few men. Tolstoy succeeded, and the whole of recent history supports his theories as to the relative importance of great men in relation to the overall movements that are represented or appropriated by a few eponymous figures. This is true at least where politicians are concerned. When we are dealing with scientists, we still admire the great genius and virtue of one man and too rarely suspect the importance of forces that made him great. We may admit that in the technological or scientific fields a multitude of people is necessary to diffuse the discoveries made and the machines invented. But surely not to create them! The great man is alone in his laboratory, alone with his concepts, and he revolutionizes the society around him by the power of his mind alone. Why is it so difficult to gain acceptance, in the case of the great men of science, for what is taken as self-evident in the case of great statesmen?
(PF: 13–14)
In The Pasteurization of France, ‘Pasteur’ is dismantled in the same way Tolstoy has dismantled the ‘Napoleon’ of nineteenth-century historians. Latour presents the Pasteurian revolution not as the rational progression of the ideas of a genius triumphing over backward minds and reactionary forces, but as the outcome of innumerable actors who in the process defined each other, disease and society. The first part of The Pasteurization of France presents, analyses and reflects upon the shared history of microbes, microbiologists and society. The philosophy underlining this analysis is outlined in the second part of the book.
The first, empirical part of The Pasteurization of France is based on a semiotic analysis of three periodicals, the Revue Scientific (from 1870–1919), Annales de l'Institut Pasteur (1887–1919), and Concours Médical (1885–1905). The corpus Latour has worked on is vast, but also limited. Foreign publications and – with a few exceptions – Pasteur's lab-notes and correspondence are left out. Moreover, semiotics is stripped to its bare bones: “since it is too meticulous to cover a period of fifty years and thousands of pages, the semiotic method is here limited to the interdefinition of actors and to the chain of translations” (PF: 11).
The authors whose publications are analysed have various backgrounds. A first group, the authors of Revue Scientific, consists of the ‘hygienists’ – the participants in the social reform movement that aimed to ‘regenerate the nation’ by improving national – especially urban – public health by a whole array of measures. Having no clear idea what causes illness, they enthusiastically set off in any direction: from improving sewage systems to therapies based on the cleansing and vivifying effects of water, country air and simple foods, to “methods of developing among the labouring classes a spirit of thrift and the saving habit.” The congresses of the hygienist movement, Latour comments, “were like an attic in which everything was kept because sometime it might come in handy” (PF: 20). The second group, the ‘Pasteurians’, consists of Pasteur and his co-workers, writing in the Annales de l'Institute Pasteur. A third group, publishing in Concours Médical, a periodical of a medical association, consists of a variety of medical doctors – army doctors, general practitioners and other medical professionals. Each of these groups shows a style and interests of its own.
Who are the ‘inscribed readers’ of the articles in these periodicals? Basically, the colleagues of the authors. The articles in Revue Scientific address hygienists, while physicians publishing in the Concours Médical wrote for their medical colleagues. Time and again, the texts speak about ‘we’. Pasteur and the Pasteurians, however, are the exception. The contributions in the Annales d'Institut Pasteur address hygienists, biologists and doctors alike, to show they have common interests.
The main problem the hygienists had to face was the ‘variation of virulence’, the mysterious patterns of the outbreak of diseases that proved contemporary doctrines of contagiousness to be inaccurate. For example, why are some fields – as farmers said – ‘cursed’, causing cattle to die of anthrax time and again, while other, neighbouring, fields were not? Existing contagious theories were of no help to explain this. Precisely on this point, Pasteur came to the rescue.
The hygienists started to refer to Pasteur and his discovery of micro-organisms in their articles already at an early stage. They believed him even before it had been proven that the measures Pasteur had shown in a few cases to be effective might be useful to society at large. For example, on the basis of Pasteur's first field experiments only, one hygienist exclaimed “anthrax will soon be a thing of the past.” When Pasteur had cured only one child of rabies, another wrote “and now that we can cure rabies, we only have to expand and facilitate the treatment.” “Yes, gentlemen, the day will come when, thanks to militant, scientific hygiene, diseases will disappear as certain antediluvian animal species have disappeared,” another hygienist had already declared a year before (PF: 27–28). Latour comments:
The confidence in the ‘way laid down’ by Pasteur must therefore derive from something other than the facts, hard facts. The confidence was not one that came only from Pasteur, but one that flowed back on Pasteur. […] [Pasteur] had only to open his mouth, and others would turn his results into generalizations about every disease. […] The social movement into which Pasteur inserted himself is a large part of the efficacy attributed to Pasteur's demonstrations.
(PF: 28)
The medical professionals showed initial reluctance to embrace Pasteur's work. However, their hesitance disappeared when they too discovered Pasteur to be on their side. Army doctors first. Dealing with large groups of recruits rather than individual patients, and thus concerned with large-scale preventive measures, they soon seized upon Pasteurism with the same avidity as hygienists (PF: 114). Civilian doctors remained reluctant for longer. They took great care to separate what was exaggerated from what was useful from their own professional point of view: “Of all that slowly accumulating work, a body of precise knowledge will certainly emerge one day […]. But we should maintain a certain reserve for the time being and not see bacteria everywhere, after previously seeing them nowhere” (PF: 117). Only in 1895, when the organization had been set up to bring the diphtheria serum to the physician's consulting room, did the physicians’ resistance weaken. By then the Concours Médical advised medical doctors to change course:
It may be not too soon to look ahead into the future that the scientific revolution, brought about by the beneficent discoveries of the illustrious Pasteur and his school, has in store for the medical profession. […] [W]e shall take possession of the new ideas. […] [W]e shall ask our young competitors [i.e. the Pasteurians], at the patient's bedside or in consultations, to share the benefits of their recent studies with us; at the same time let us tell them that, by way of compensation, we shall share with them the fruits of our experience in the skill of the medical profession.
(PF: 129–131)
There is nothing new under the sun, sociologists may conclude. People follow their interests and they will assimilate new ideas only when they find them to be beneficial to their own purposes. However, sociologists will be surprised to hear Latour's far more radical conclusions.
Which messages did Pasteur and his co-workers bring to the communities of hygienists and medical doctors? That “we cannot form society with the social alone” (PF: 35); and that “the laboratory is an indisputable fulcrum” (PF: 72) to shift the balance of power between men and disease. These messages are the outcome of three steps.
In the first step,
Pasteur or his disciplines visited in person distilleries, breweries, wine-making plants, silkworm rearing houses, farms, Alexandria decimated by cholera, and later, with the Institut Pasteur, all the [French] colonies. […] They moved but remained men of the laboratory. They brought their own tools, microscopes, sterile utensils, and laboratory logbooks, using them in environments where their use was unknown. On the other hand, they redirected their laboratories to respond to the cause of those who they visited.
(PF: 75–76)
So, to study anthrax, Pasteur went to the countryside, to collect on site materials at farms in the département Eure-et-Loir.
Back in Paris, knowing that predecessors had identified the anthrax bacillus but had been unable to show convincingly that it caused the disease, Pasteur performed the second step of his programme. To show that the bacillus was the sole agent of anthrax, he took just a drop of a culture liquid extracted on site from animals, to start a new culture, and to repeat this procedure several times. He then showed that the last drop of the last culture still caused the complete disease. So, he concluded, the bacillus is the unique agent of disease.
As these were still only laboratory experiments, in the third step Pasteur moved back from Paris to the field, to find out what happens in the countryside itself. How did the bacillus end up in an animal? Why were some fields ‘cursed’, while others were not? To answer this question, Pasteur concerned himself with techniques of burying the animals that had died of the disease. As the animals lost blood at the moment of burial, they also lost the bacilli. Koch had already shown in 1876 that they might live on as spores that retain their pathogenicity for a long time. But how did they turn up years later on the surface? “The Académie will be surprised to hear the explanation of this,” Pasteur would report. “Earthworms are the messengers of the germ and from its deep burial place bring the terrible parasite back to the surface of the soil” (PF: 78). His conclusion led to a fairly obvious and simple prophylactic measure: animals that had died of anthrax must never be buried in fields intended for grazing or for growing fodder. If this measure was followed, Pasteur predicted, anthrax could be a thing of the past.
In three steps, using his laboratory as a fulcrum, Pasteur showed farmers the way to stop the dreaded cattle disease. But in the same move, he also solved the problem that had paralyzed the hygienists: the variance of disease. Pasteur's experiments showed the cause. Although dead animals were buried deep into the soil, earthworms brought the agent back to the surface, to infect new animals.
So Pasteur also had another message: we do not know who are the agents who make up our world, a message Latour sums up in one sentence: “there are more of us than we thought” (PF: 35). ‘Social’ relations do not form a society alone. “When we speak of men, societies, culture, and objects, there are everywhere crowds of other agents that act, pursue aims unknown to us, and use us to prosper. We may inspect pure water, milk, hands, curtains, sputum, the air we breathe, and see nothing suspect, but millions of other individuals are moving around that we do not see” (PF: 35). Only by taking a detour to the laboratory, can our unknown enemies be identified and become controlled. Once we learn from laboratory practices how to adapt agricultural, industrial and medical practices we may not only control the enemies inside the laboratory, but also in society at large. That message fell on fertile soil. The hygienists could begin to clean up their attic, medical doctors to reorganize their practice. Pasteur had shown them the way to pursue their own goals. However, we cannot ‘explain’ their actions merely by their political motives and interests, by ‘social facts’. To understand how the Pasteurians revolutionized public health, veterinary practice and eventually society, we have to include the microbes in the narrative.
By moving the microbes to his laboratory, Pasteur succeeded in turning them from an unknown, invisible, dangerous enemy into a clearly identifiable one that could be defeated by vaccines or – e.g. by taking the role of earthworms into account – precautionary measures. Only by teaming up with Pasteur's laboratory, which enabled them to take the existence of the microbes into account and to redefine their concerns and actions, could the hygienists and the medical doctors redefine their old interests. Turning themselves into a new kind of professional, they became engaged in political games renewed “from top to bottom with new forces” (PF: 40). The detour to Pasteur's laboratory turned the scales. Before Pasteur, farmers and veterinarians were weaker than the invisible anthrax bacilli. The disease was unpredictable, reinforcing the idea that idiosyncratic local circumstances were its cause. In Pasteur's laboratory, the bacillus was identified as the unique cause of the disease. Returning to the field, pointing to the role of burying practices and earthworms, Pasteur had shown how to account for the variation of the disease. In three steps, Pasteur showed how man could become stronger than the bacilli. But the scales were also turned in another way. By embracing and implementing Pasteur's ideas and techniques in their practice, the hygienists also redefined Pasteur to become the great man of French science who revolutionized veterinary practice, public health and society.
Taking stock at the end of War and Peace of Microbes, Latour claims to have given back to the sciences “the crowd of heterogeneous allies which make up their troops and of which they are merely the much-decorated high command whose function is always uncertain” (PF: 147). The allies include hygienists, army doctors, laboratory equipment, farms and earthworms. They “were an integral part of so-called scientific objects. […] We understand nothing of the solidity of a fact if we do not take into account the unskilled troops” (PF: 147). In Tolstoyian fashion, Latour thus takes issue with the myth that scientific knowledge flows from the mind of a genius to spread through society under the flag of reason.
Microbes play in my account a more personal role than in so-called scientific histories and a more central role than in so-called social histories. Indeed, as soon as we stop reducing the sciences to a few authorities that stand in place of them, what reappears is not only the crowds of human beings, as in Tolstoy, but also the ‘nonhuman’, eternally banished from the [i.e. Kant's] Critique.
(PF: 149–150).
Latour has a message not only for historians and philosophers, but also for sociologists eager to explain scientific developments by power, ideologies or other social facts.
If sociology wishes to be the science of ‘social facts’, then it cannot understand this period [of the Pasteurian revolution]. If […] we still call ourselves sociologists, we must redefine this science, not as the science of the social, but as the science of associations. We cannot say of these associations whether they are human or natural, made up of microbes or surplus value, but only that they are strong or weak.
(PF: 40)
Irreductions, the second part of The Pasteurization of France, attempts to expand and generalize these lessons in philosophical terms. But before he turns to them, in a reflexive note, Latour realizes that he cannot claim for himself what he denies to the Pasteurians. He has spoken of the Pasteurians as they spoke of their microbes. “My proofs are no more irrefutable then theirs, and no less disputable. I must go looking for friends and allies, interest them, draw their attention to what I have written […]” (PF: 148). The reader is warned.
Irreductions, Latour's Tractatus Scientifico-Politicus (PF: 234), is an abstruse text. It consists of apodictic, often flamboyant, decimally numbered statements and aphorisms, interspersed with interludes of personal reflection. But not only its style makes Irreductions sometimes hard to penetrate. Latour also struggles with the problem encountered by anyone who tries to communicate a radical idea: to express and explain new ideas, one has to use old words. One may try to use them in new combinations, use scare quotes and new allusions to stretch their meaning and add a few neologisms, but by diverging too far from the established usage of language one will soon call down upon oneself the suspicion of writing gibberish.
In Latour's case, the problem is aggravated for two reasons. In the first place, many of the key-terms in Irreductions – like ‘force’, ‘strength’, ‘potency’ and ‘reality’ – have a wide variety of meanings not only in everyday language but also in science, politics and the philosophical tradition. For example, where ‘force’ is used in combination with ‘interest’, the term suggests an agent with intentions and a political reading of the term; however, in combination with ‘lever’ and ‘fulcrum’, a physical reading is suggested, without any allusion to intentionality. In The Pasteurization of France, Latour uses ‘force’ in both combinations, leaving the reader puzzled about what is meant. In the second place, Latour's ontology is strikingly different from the intuitions and the conceptual bifurcations that in the long tradition of Western philosophical thought we have been taught to hold dear. Reading that nonhuman agents have wishes and interests, one may easily think that the author is out of his mind. Not only old habits, but also philosophical notions die hard.
The introduction to Irreductions explicitly addresses the latter point. Again a novel serves as a guide. Tournier's (1972 [1967]) Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique inverts Defoe's story of Robinson Crusoe. Where Tolstoy's War and Peace deconstructed the hero of nationalistic historiographies, Tournier takes issue with the Eurocentric and racist Weltanschauung of Crusoe, to replace it with the worldview of Vendredi (Friday).
Crusoe thinks he knows the origin of order: the Bible, timekeeping, discipline, land registers, and account books. But Friday is less certain about what is strong and what is ordered. Crusoe thinks he can distinguish between force and reason. As the only being on his island, he weeps from loneliness, while Friday finds himself among rivals, allies, traitors, friends, confidants, a whole mass of brothers and chums, of whom only one carries the name of man. Crusoe senses only one type of force, whereas Friday has many more up on his sleeve.
(PF: 154)
When Friday has carelessly blown up the powder house, Robinson Crusoe finds his neatly ordered world destroyed. In Tournier's version of Defoe's story, instead of rebuilding his stockades and turning back to his orderly discipline, Crusoe decides to follow Friday to discover that the latter lives on a completely different island. Crusoe too has to learn that he is among a wide variety of friends, allies, and rivals. Soon he feels at home in this world. When more than 28 years after the shipwreck that brought Crusoe to the island a new boat, the Whitebird, has anchored off their island, Friday departs. Confronted with the brutality, hatred and greed of Whitebird's captain and his crew, and realizing the irrevocable relativity of the goals they feverishly pursue, Crusoe decides to remain behind. To his surprise, the next morning he finds the young Estonian ship boy on the island, who has fled the ship. He decides to call him Jeudi, “the day of Jupiter, the god of Heaven, and of Children's Sunday [the fête of laughter and play]” (Tournier 1972 [1967]: 253).
Latour didn't have to wait for a Friday to blow up the ordered world of modernity. He had done so himself in the first part of The Pasteurization of France. Subsequently, in Irreductions, like Tournier's Crusoe, Latour decides not to restore the old order, but to describe a world of a multitude of forces engaged in trials, that may enlist each other to gain strength and that signify their reality by resisting trials. In this world, man is only one of many forces. Like Tournier's Crusoe, Latour is satisfied with his new world. He decides to be “as agnostic and as fair as it is possible” (PF: 236), wondering in the last line of The Pasteurization of France, whether, like Tournier's Crusoe, he too will find new company. “In the old Europe are we still capable of swapping places in this way?”
Force, strength, trials – the language suggests a Hobbesian world of wars of all against all, a Machiavellian arena of actors driven by Nietzschean Wills to Power. Latour is aware that the bellicose associations may scare his readers. He suggests that replacing ‘force’ by ‘weakness’ may ease them (PF: 252, n.6). In place of ‘force’ we may talk also of ‘entelechies’, ‘monads’, or more simply ‘actants’ (IRR: 1.1.7).
Ignore the allusions to Aristotle and Leibniz; Nietzsche, who Latour had read as a student, comes closer. His philosophy resounds in the epiphany Latour had on his way from Dijon to Gray in 1972 (PF: 162–3; cf. ch. 1). In the 1880s, in notes that were posthumously published under the title Der Wille zur Macht, “Nietzsche […] claimed that nothing in the world has intrinsic features of its own and that each thing is constituted solely through its interrelations with, and differences from, everything else” (Nehamas 1985: 82). “[Kant's] ‘thing-in-itself’ is nonsensical. If I remove all the relationships, all the ‘properties’, all the ‘activities’ of a thing, the thing does not remain over,” Nietzsche (1966: 563) wrote. “The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’: if one removes from thought all other ‘things’, a thing has no properties, that is, there is no thing without other things, that is, there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ ” (Nietzsche 1966: 502–503). Like Nietzsche, Latour gives relations pride of place over essences. This explains why he can suggest that instead of ‘strength’ his readers may read ‘weakness’ – both are properties that only make sense in a relational context: something has ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ only in comparison to something else – and why one may read ‘actant’ instead: an entity is an ‘actant’ if and only if its action makes a difference to a situation and to other actants. So “[n]othing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (IRR: 1.1.1). What an entity is depends on its relations with other entities, the web of connections in which it has become established, the translations that it has performed and the translations that have been performed on it. But each attempt to act or to engage in a relation can fail. To try, a verb, is Latour's point of departure (IRR: 1.1.2). Each relation involves a trial. To exist, to have properties, to show activity, an entity has to subsist, to hold its ground in tests, to resist in trials; existence is not guaranteed by an essence.
To get a feel for the ontology Latour introduces in Irreductions, conceive a play staged in a theatre as a model for the world. What is happening and who and what do exist on stage? To answer these questions, one has to focus on the relations between actors; they define what each is and how they change in the course of the play, to become a hero, a villain or the abandoned lover. How does a main actor become a character in the world on stage? Only by interacting with other actors and with artefacts, and by speaking about himself, events, other characters, and artefacts. What kind of character is he? In a play, on stage, artefacts, other characters and his own actions will define him. The words he speaks, the crown on his head and the fact that other players address him as ‘your majesty’ define the actor as a king. To become a character in the play, the actor hired by the theatre-company needs props and other actors. The web of relations he will engage in on stage constitutes what – in the world enacted on stage – he is. In a subsequent stage performance, with other props, other players and other lines being spoken, the actor will become another character, another being.
However, if the actor that the theatre company has hired moves clumsily, and instead of making what was intended as a kingly gesture causes the crown to fall in the orchestra pit, the world created on stage loses its king. Being not good enough to do his act, the actor lacks the necessary strength to be the king on stage. Likewise, when other members of the cast forget their lines, or when the cardboard crown turns out to be much too big to fit the actor's head, the king on stage loses his reality. All that remains is a failed performance. So, to become part of the world, to exist and stay real, one has to get enough strength to ‘resist’ trials, to hold one's ground in a test. Chances of success may be improved by enlisting another actant to become a third actant, or by organizing several actants in a chain or network (IRR: 1.4.2). But enlisting or enrolling others will always come with costs: any alliance will translate an actant into a new one.
With Nietzsche, Latour defends a relationist ontology. But how to analyse these relations empirically? Semiotics taught Latour the vocabulary and the technique for extracting what is (in a text read as a play) from narrative forms. The ontology Latour introduces in Irreductions is semiotics writ large.
No intrinsic features, but a multitude of human and nonhuman actants; no a priori distinction between humans and nonhumans, man and nature. Everything that Latour grants to humans – force, action, strategies, interests – he also grants to nonhumans. An uncommon world indeed.
How many forces or actants are there? We will have to find out by trials, that is, by measuring actants against each other. The actant we call Pasteur has to meet the actants he calls microbes, to set up a trial, an experiment, to allow them to multiply in his carefully prepared cultures, to turn them from an invisible enemy into a visible one that he can manipulate – isolate, dry, transport – at his will. So both the subject and the object of an enquiry are actants and we had better abandon the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ because they will set us on the course of epistemology. That something is real is defined by its resistance in a trial. What it is, is not given by an eternally given essence, but also shows in trials. To know what a fish is, biologists, the fishing industry, and consumers, all have to set up trials. And for each of them, a fish is something different. While for the one a fish is a vertebrate, for the other it is a commodity, or is food. This is not a matter of different ‘interpretations’. To know that the food on your plate at dinner is fish, you don't need to ‘interpret’; just start eating and enjoy it. If you still remain suspicious about what you are eating, ask the chef or call for somebody to do a few chemical or biological tests. You can leave your textbooks on hermeneutics untouched. There is no need to add an extra layer of ‘interpretations’ apart from reality.
Latour's philosophy conceives knowledge-production as a move, as (a set of) translations that have to be realized in the world, rather than as an attempt of a subject, a human mind, or a community of scientists, to acquire knowledge about ‘real’ objects, that is, to interpret phenomena. “Nothing is known – only realized,” Irreductions (1.1.5.4) states rather cryptically (cf. also PF: 148). However, the phrase is less cryptic than it might seem at first sight. Do you want to know whether something is strong? Try to bend it. Do you want to know whether A is longer than B? Set up a trial: compare the two. Is what's on your plate really fish? Perform, or order, a test. Knowledge is a matter of actants setting up trials in a world populated by other actants to make what is real – that is, resists trials – visible.
“There can be no ‘symbolic’ to add to ‘the real’ ” (IRR: 2.5.6.2). “It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of ‘words’ and those that play the role of ‘things’ ” (IRR: 2.4.5). Latour is “willing to talk about ‘logic’, but only if it is seen as a branch of public works or civil engineering” (IRR: 1.4.4). There is no contrast between force and reason. “What we call ‘science’ is made up of a large array of elements whose power we prefer to attribute to a few” (IRR: 4.1.6). That is what the first part of The Pasteurization of France, Laboratory Life and Latour's analysis of Pasteur's Mémoire tried to show. Analysing the sequence of texts from three periodicals, in The Pasteurization of France, Latour asked ontological questions: what does the world we encounter in these texts contain? Which actants do we encounter and how do they translate and interdefine each other in the course of fifty years? How was ‘Pasteur’ constructed, how did he come into being as the famous son of France?
But is it possible to empirically reconstruct by semiotic methods what has happened in France around 1900 from three periodicals and even to claim to have detected the role of the “crowd of heterogeneous allies” of Pasteur, including microbes and earthworms? Semiotics brackets off both external referents – the things and events a text speaks about – and the pragmatic or social context of authors and readers (cf. ch. 2). It instructs us to analyse how in and by a text internal referents, inscribed authors and inscribed readers are constructed. So can a semiotic analysis ever bring us to the historical past? We'll get to that in § 3.3.
Latour describes the world, knowledge and society in terms strikingly different from the Western tradition that runs from Plato to Descartes and Kant up to modern philosophy of science and the sociological tradition. In the second half of Irreductions he starts explicitly to distance himself from these traditions, again in apodictic statements and aphorisms. He will do so extensively, in more detail and more clearly, in We Have Never Been Modern. We will leave these issues for discussion in chapter 5. For now, let's first see what has been achieved, and at what costs.
The Pasteurization of France got mixed reviews. The first half of the book and its style were widely praised. According to the philosopher of science Hacking (1992: 511), Latour had produced “an imaginative and well-informed account of what Pasteur did, although the form of the story is certainly nonstandard. It is rich in quotations that other scholars ignored.” Vernon (1990: 345), a historian of science, concluded that the first part was “engagingly written, though there is little new in substance. Many historians already knew that, in the short term, little in the practice of medicine, hygiene or brewing was changed by Pasteur or germ theory; we would expect that hygienists and Pasteurians would use each other for their own ends. But these points are worth emphasizing and Latour does it very well, not least by exposing the presumptions implicit in ‘heroic’ accounts.” Reviewing the French version, Les Microbes, for Social Studies of Science, Knorr-Cetina (1985: 585) wrote: “Latour has the rare gift of stimulating one's thinking and of giving ideas, even if one does not agree with what he says! But the greatest interest of the book, and its wider relevance to social studies of science, lies perhaps in the fact that this is the first attempt by a student of scientific practice to begin to analyse the question of the social ‘diffusion’ of knowledge, of the ‘scientization’ of society, or of ‘knowledge utilization’.”
However, the second half of the book, Irreductions, was met at best with puzzlement. Vernon (1990: 345) suggested that it “deserves detailed attention from philosophers and sociologists.” Philosopher Hacking (1992: 511), however, limited himself to remarking that this half of the book “is a fascinating, wandering series of meditations and reflections which will certainly delight some readers, but which will be impenetrable to most readers of this [philosophy of science] journal.” Knorr-Cetina provided more substance. She criticized at length “Latour's Nietzschean theory of the political nature of all social life […]” (1985: 581). Moreover she commented that “[t]hose committed to the sociology of knowledge perspective must be disappointed by the fact that […] the microbes appear in the book as a weapon in the political struggles between Pasteur and the others […]. [They] are treated as natural agents and not [as] (social) constructions” (Knorr-Cetina 1985: 584).
The last comment set off an alarm. In a footnote to the English edition, Latour stressed that Knorr-Cetina and other reviewers of Les Microbes had misunderstood what he was up to. He explicitly denied that he was “interested in offering a social and political interpretation of Pasteur as an alternative to other cognitive or technical interpretations” (PF: 252 n.10). What he had intended was not another study in social studies of science, but to go further, to take the discipline to its next step, to make another turn after the social turn. “I am interested […] in retracing our steps back to the moment when the very distinction between content and context had not yet been made. If I use the words ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strategy’, ‘interests,’ their use has to be equally distributed between Pasteur and those human and nonhuman actors who give him his strength” (PF 252 n.10 italics added). Apart from the four methodological principles introduced by Bloor (cf. ch. 2), Latour insisted on accepting a fifth rule: in the analysis humans and nonhumans should be treated symmetrically. After the ‘social turn’ that the new sociology of scientific knowledge had introduced, another turn was called for.
It may have been a small step for Latour, but it was a big step for the social studies of science community – too big in fact. Not only did the new turn Latour suggested imply that the ambition to sociologically explain the content of science by its (social) context had to be discarded. The suggestion that human and nonhuman resources should be considered symmetrically also meant that the cornerstone of the sociology of scientific knowledge – the flexibility of human interpretations of the nonhuman world – lost its prominent analytical position. Latour seemed to suggest that in the construction of scientific knowledge nonhumans had independent power, a voice of their own. As a consequence, the turn Latour suggested was perceived as a reversion to a rather naive form of realism and as a retraction from the terrain that the sociology of scientific knowledge claimed to have conquered. Soon polemical, in some cases quite aggressive, reactions started to appear, arguing that what Latour had suggested as a step forward, in fact was a step backwards, a bad, reactionary joke (Amsterdamska 1990; Schaffer 1991; Collins and Yearley 1992; Bloor 1999a; 1999b).
To some extent, Latour had called this reaction upon himself. In the first place, by presenting his ideas as an extension of the programme of social studies of science, rather than as an explicit transition to another programme, which in fact it is. Les Microbes had already many references to the social studies of science literature; its English edition refers also to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge published after 1984, the year Les Microbes was published. At the same time, Latour distanced himself from the sociologists of scientific knowledge, for example by teasingly claiming that old-school (mostly American) sociology of scientists was more reasonable than the new (mostly British) sociology of scientific knowledge (PF: 257 n.27). The science studies people he considered as his friends did not appreciate the irony.
Also Latour's language offered little help to convince his friends. That microbes have ‘interests’, ‘wishes’ and ‘strategies’ and that they ‘enthusiastically’ grew in the medium that Pasteur provided, is hard to swallow for most readers. Living in the modern, rationalized world, they are used to making a categorical distinction between on the one hand the domain of humans and on the other hand the ‘disenchanted’ nonhuman world (Weber 1968 [1919]: 594). Instead of thinking that microbes ‘enthusiastically’ grew in the medium Pasteur provided, they think that Pasteur had just observed the microbes to multiply. Period. Referring to the microbes’ ‘enthusiasm’ to do so was conceived as a misleading, if not bizarre, anthropomorphic addition. Perhaps French readers may appreciate peppering a sentence this way, but serious British academics do not. Latour's comment (PF: 260 n.5) that whenever he used the words ‘interest’ and ‘interested’ he was not referring to sociological ‘interest theory’, but to the notion of translation – that is, “simply what is placed ‘in between’ some actor and its achievements” – didn't help to convince his sociological colleagues either. “[I]f we check this claim by trying to substitute the words ‘in between’, or the general idea of in-betweenness, in the passages in which Latour uses the word ‘interest’ we find it does not work,” observed Bloor (1999: 100), who found it unnecessary to try more charitable ways of checking Latour's suggestion.
Finally, it was unclear about what Latour was aiming at in methodological terms. He declared his intention as “to explain the science of the Pasteurians” (PF 8–9). But what does ‘to explain’ – a term that pops up in The Pasteurization of France more than a hundred times – mean? Not to analyse “the ‘influences’ exerted ‘on’ Pasteur or […] the ‘social conditions’ that ‘accelerated’ or ‘slowed down’ his successes” (PF: 8). Instead, Latour declares his intention to set out to “describe [the science of the Pasteurians] without resorting to any terms of the tribe” (PF 9). However, in the chapters that follow, Latour cites at length from the texts of the Pasteurians and those who applied Pasteur's ideas and techniques, to rephrase only (meta-) terms like ‘proof’, ‘efficacy’, demonstration’, ‘reality’ and ‘revolution’ that the tribes – and later historians – used to evaluate what Pasteur had achieved, in terms of ‘force’, ‘strength’ and ‘trials’. Does that count as ‘providing an explanation’?
“In order to make my case, I seem to be putting myself in an indefensible position,” Latour sighed (PF: 9). Quite so, the sociologists of scientific knowledge thought. Latour's “criticisms are based on a systematic misrepresentation of the positions [of sociologists of scientific knowledge] he rejects, and […] his own approach, in so far as it is different, is unworkable,” Bloor (1999: 82) concluded. The new turn Latour suggested “is obscurantism raised to the level of a general methodological principle” (Bloor 1999: 97).
However, it is one thing to express irritation about what is perceived at first sight as abstruse language and obscurantist claims, it is quite another to prove that someone who suggests a new approach has made mistakes or has missed crucial points that affect his conclusions. The Cambridge historian of science Schaffer was one of only a very few commentators who took the trouble to confront Latour on his own terrain, to go into the details of his study and to point to aspects that had been left out of Latour's empirical study but that Schaffer claimed to be significant. Schaffer's (1991) extensive review of The Pasteurization of France deserves close reading for its detailed criticism of the semiotic method and of Latour's “attribution of purpose, will and life to inanimate matter, and of human interests to the nonhuman” – an inclination Schaffer called ‘hylozoism’, a polemical term he borrowed from the English poet and philosopher Coleridge (Schaffer 1991: 182).
Schaffer starts out by generously praising Latour for having succeeded “brilliantly” in demystifying Pasteur and for having adopted two “admirable rules of method” that the “Anglophonic reader, if moved by an irenic spirit” can also find in the work of Collins and other sociologists of scientific knowledge: “first study systems in the course of controversy, when all is unstable and up for grabs, since closure effaces the memory of the work through which the taken-for-granted is established; second, do not accept the rigid boundary between the scientific-technical and the social-contextual which is often a result of these passages of action, and so cannot be used to explain them” (Schaffer 1991: 177, 180). However, the main body of his review criticizes both Latour's use of semiotics that led him to neglect the social processes involved in the production of scientific knowledge, and Latour's ‘hylozoism’. Schaffer claims that the two points are directly connected. “Hylozoism directs our attention away from the forces [the sociology of scientific knowledge has brought to the fore] which help close [a] dispute. It therefore disables understanding” (Schaffer 1991: 189). Both points of critique and their connection deserve scrutiny.
First Latour's use of the semiotic method. In the first part of The Pasteurization of France Latour analyses what the inscribed readers of three periodical are supposed to take as the message of the published texts. Unfortunately, instead of ‘inscribed reader’, Latour used the term ‘ideal reader’. The phrase puts Schaffer on the wrong foot. He takes the ideal reader to be “a figure produced by authors as a role for their audience, whose behaviour the author must seek to control” (Schaffer 1991: 178 italics added), instead of a figure produced by the text. A passage in which Latour reports that “when I began to read the Revue Scientifique after the defeat of 1870 [of France in the Franco-German war], I was surprised to observe that little was said about Pasteur,” adds to the confusion. “Are we to identify the ‘ideal reader’ with the nineteenth-century public, or with the author of The Pasteurization of France?” Schaffer (1991: 178) asks.
The answer is: with neither. Schaffer confuses the real readers of a text with the inscribed readers whom a semiotic analysis brings to the fore. When an article in the Revue Scientifique contains the phrase “Yes, gentlemen, the day will come when, thanks to scientific hygiene, disease will disappear”, there is no doubt who are the ‘gentlemen’ the text addresses as inscribed reader (namely fellow hygienists). Of course, a real reader may still have had doubts about the power of scientific hygiene; he may not even have finished reading the sentence because he was called for dinner. Likewise, when in the Concours Médical a text states that “we should maintain a certain reserve for the time being”, it is clear who the inscribed “we” are (namely fellow medical professionals) although, of course, there may have been real nineteenth-century subscribers to the Concours Médical who by that time already viewed Pasteur's work with less reluctance.
But does a semiotic reading that focuses on inscribed readers then allow one to conclude anything about what real nineteenth-century readers thought? Yes, by following the course of debates in Revue Scientifique and Concours Médical over decades, observing the changes in the published texts over time, Latour can conclude that real nineteenth-century readers indeed came to accept the messages that the inscribed readers of the articles were supposed to. Thus he is allowed to conclude that as a historical, empirical fact that from the early 1880s the hygienists trusted Pasteur without question and that – in due course – the medical professionals would do so too.
Schaffer has one more string to his bow. “I should remind the reader again at this point that I am limiting my sources to what an ‘ideal’ [i.e. inscribed] reader would know of Pasteur and his alliances, were he or she to read only the Revue Scientifique,” Latour warned his Anglophone readers (PF 256 n.19). That leaves open the question how Pasteur knew who his ‘alliances’ were. The answer, of course, is that his experiments in his laboratory and his onsite observations (e.g. of burial practices), led Pasteur to conclude that microbes cause the diseases he studied. Schaffer correctly points out that to describe what Pasteur did in the seclusion of his laboratory, Latour had to fall back on Pasteur's lab-journals, that is, to follow a route that the readers of the Revue Scientifique and Concours Médical cannot have travelled. If we allow Latour to use these texts, is it clear who were Pasteur's ‘alliances’? Pasteur may have believed that, but, as Schaffer is quick to point out, his work was subject to controversy. In the scientific community, Pasteur met strong opponents like Koch, Pouchet and others. The controversies in the scientific world are omitted from Latour's story; Schaffer (1991: 186, 188) even claims “deliberately” so.
Schaffer claims that this omission allows Latour to shortcut the social processes of overcoming (what Collins has called) the experimenters’ regress, that is, the social processes that bring a controversy to closure and that turn local, private lab work into a public, established scientific fact. Pasteur's statement that the disease he has studied is caused by microbes became an established ‘scientific fact’ only after the controversies in the scientific community had reached closure, a process that is left undiscussed in The Pasteurization of France. This leads to Latour's other sin, Schaffer claims. “By suppressing the controversies which surround Pasteurism [and the social processes that bring them to closure], Latour is able to use ‘the microbes’ as wilful actors. Instead of symmetry [in dealing with true and false beliefs], he tries hylozoism. […] Only through hylozoism can he speak of the events within Pasteur's lab's walls” (Schaffer op. cit.: 186).
So, according to Schaffer, Latour's ‘hylozoism’ is a direct consequence of his use of the semiotic technique of analysis. The semiotic method leads to ignoring the underdetermination of scientific proof (i.e. the flexibility of (human) interpretation) and the crucial role and social processes to reach closure in scientific debates. A true sociologist of scientific knowledge would have explored the ways in which the statements that came out of Pasteur's local laboratory are made into robust scientific facts, that is, would have described how in complex social processes the experimenters’ regress was overcome. He would have provided an even-handed treatment of Pasteur and Koch, and of the interests of the French republican and German imperial regimes that matched their respective research strategies, Schaffer (1991: 191) suggests. In this account, the microbes would have no independent role. The explanation of the course history took would be framed exclusively in terms of human and national interests.
Would Latour's account have to be corrected and rewritten if the scientific controversies in which Pasteur got involved were included? Schaffer thinks so, but – within the confines of a book-review – he has to limit himself to making a few programmatic suggestions. Apart from dealing with the way the debates between Koch, Pasteur, Pouchet and others reached closure, he suggests a sociology of science and society would also have to “account for the ways the world must change to allow facts to travel” (Schaffer 1991: 191).
Indeed. But, of course, this is exactly what Latour claims to have done. He has studied how the facts Pasteur claimed to have discovered were accepted by hygienists, even before the scientific community had closed the debate about his claims. Pasteur's conclusion that there are more of us than we thought, that we have to take microbes and earthworms into account, did travel in hygienists’ circles as an established fact, not as a disputable interpretation of his local lab-work that waited for approval by other scientists. As we have seen before, the hygienists believed Pasteur even before the measures he suggested had shown their efficacy in more than a few cases. Their confidence in him was not based on hard facts, established after the closure of controversies that divided the international community of early microbiologists. Pasteur did not have to wait for his French scientific opponents and for Koch to approve his work. His message that there are more of us than we thought was accepted by French hygienists and began to affect society even before the scientific controversy had reached closure. And, as noted before, this had an important effect: “the social movement into which Pasteur inserted himself is a large part of the efficacy attributed to Pasteur's demonstrations” (PF: 28). Hence, to describe the role of Pasteurianism in French society, Latour has good empirical reasons to ignore – “deliberately” or not – the controversies around Pasteur's work and the social processes in the scientific community that brought the controversies about his claims in scientific circles to closure.
Schaffer's review once more highlights the philosophical divide that was growing between Latour and the sociologists of scientific knowledge. By suggesting ‘another turn after the social’ Latour did not extend the programme of sociology of scientific knowledge; rather he moved to a different programme.
Sociologists of scientific knowledge studied the social processes of the production of scientific knowledge, that is, the production of statements about the world that after closure of disputes about the interpretation of phenomena are accepted as stating scientific facts. Their problematic was an epistemological one; they tried to explain in sociological terms how scientific knowledge was established. Although allowing also interests that are usually conceived as ‘external’ to science to play out in the social processes that turn local lab-work into publicly accepted facts, they nevertheless gave the scientific community pride of place. For the sociologists of scientific knowledge, a ‘scientific fact’ is established if and only if the scientific community has established closure of its controversies. But this leaves an important question unanswered. Who are part of the relevant community? Pasteur and Koch, for sure. But what about the hygienists, army doctors and general practitioners? They did more than just pave the way to allow facts to travel that had been fully confirmed in academic circles. They contributed significantly to Pasteur's success, even before closure had been reached in scientific circles. To understand the role of Pasteur in French society, a focus exclusively on knowledge production in the scientific (academic) community leads to short-sightedness.
Although he explicitly presented The Pasteurization of France as a contribution to the sociology of scientific knowledge, in fact Latour had set out on a different journey. He displays Pasteur's work not for its producing knowledge about the world, but as moves, that is, as (a set of) translations, that have to be realized in the world. Latour raises ontological questions: how are these translations realized and how do they affect the way a wide variety of actants interdefine each other? The tools that help him to answer these questions are suggested by semiotics. And to use them, we do not only have to “abandon knowledge about knowledge” (SA: 7); we also have to abandon what we think makes up the world. We have to be “as agnostic and as fair as possible” (PF: 236). We not only have to apply the four methodological principles the sociology of scientific knowledge adopted, to be impartial and symmetric with regard to truth and falsehood, rationality and irrationality, that is, to abstain from the evaluatory terms the people we study use, but also to abstain from a priori attributing different categories and competences to humans and nonhumans.
No doubt, interpretations play a role in the making of science and in the way scientists’ work changes society. Both in Laboratory Life and in his analysis of Pasteur's Mémoire, epistemological questions and the role of interpretations are addressed. But for Latour, interpretations are not statements about the world, they are moves in the world; they are one type of many possible operations that actants use to redefine and enrol another. Of course, we may expect to find differences between human and nonhuman actants. Humans show many capacities that are not available to nonhumans. For example, they can interpret a text, an event, and phenomena; they not only have the capability to see something, but may also see something as something else (cf. Wittgenstein (PU, Part 2, XI), thus redefining what they encounter, exposing ‘interpretative flexibility’. As their performances show, nonhumans display other capabilities, many of them not available to humans. Bacillus anthracis can kill cows and sheep, while comma bacillus can cause cholera and kill people. Inanimate objects have again other capacities. There is a multitude of actants in the world and there is a multitude of operations that they use to translate and interdefine each other. Interpreting is only one of them. Perhaps it is an operation that belongs exclusively to the domain of human actants – something that ethologists and biologists may question. But even if we have to conclude that interpretation is an exclusive human competence, this does not prevent us from approaching humans and nonhumans methodologically on a par, that is, symmetrically, when we start out to describe the world.
The history of science shows abundant evidence that getting rid of established and intuitively convincing distinctions may open up fruitful new ways of understanding. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, astronomy boldly removed the Ancient distinction between what goes on in the heavens and in the sub-lunar world. Darwin's theory of evolution audaciously placed man in the animal kingdom. If counter-intuitive ideas had been forbidden in science, little if any progress would have been made. So why not be bold and try a methodology that treats humans and nonhumans on a par, that is, one that does not impose a priori some asymmetry between on the one hand human intentional action, interpretation and reasoning, and on the other hand a material world of causal relations, to see where this will lead us? If there are real differences among human and nonhuman actants, we'll come across them; they will show up in the course of the investigation, by the way actants resist trials.
By suggesting ‘another turn after the social’ Latour proposes to reject the conventional distinction between humans and nonhumans as the starting point for redescribing the world and society; however, a distinction between full-fledged human subjects and respectable objects may be the point of arrival (PH: 182). But epistemologically it is a big step. It implies that knowledge production is no longer conceived as a matter of forwarding (exclusively human) interpretations of the world, but is analysed as one of many moves in a world that consists of both humans and nonhumans. By taking the turn Latour suggests, ontology rather than epistemology gets pride of place. After this turn, epistemological issues will be analysed in ontological terms, that is, in terms of chains of translation that involve both human and nonhuman actants. Then, as Latour's anatomy of Pasteur's Mémoire shows, we find that in science, knowledge and reality are ‘co-produced’.
The turn to ontology that Latour suggests redefines science studies. It can no longer pretend to explain science in terms of social processes and interests. To describe society and the role of science in society, the analysis cannot be restricted to the social processes of knowledge production. Social order, society, scientific communities, are made up of much more than only the ‘social relations’ sociology-textbooks focus on. As Latour summed up Pasteur's message: “There are more of us than we thought.” One also has to include the role of microbes and inanimate objects in the description. To describe science and its role in society one has to adopt a different style of work and a new explanatory ideal.
To spell out this new ideal, Latour (1988b) contrasts two types of explanation:
The first is common to all disciplines: hold the elements of A [the explanans] and deduce – correlate, produce, predict, reorganize, comment or enlighten – as many elements of B [the explanandum] as possible. The second [is]: display the work of extracting elements from B, the work of bringing it to A, the work of making up explanations inside A, the work of acting back on B from A. […] The first is reductionist, because holding a single element of A is tantamount to holding all the elements of B. The second [is] irreductionist because it adds the work of reduction to the rest, instead of subtracting the rest once the reduction is achieved.
(Latour 1988b: 162–3)
The Pasteurization of France follows the irreductionist programme. Latour has trailed the route Pasteur travelled to find the cause of anthrax and the variation of the disease: the steps from the field to his laboratory where experiments were conducted and back to the field, showing in each step the work that was implied, the translations that were enacted and the trials that had to be overcome. Displaying Pasteur's work and showing how it is taken up by hygienists and medical professionals, Latour speaks “about the Pasteurians as they have spoken about microbes” (PF: 148). He describes what they did, what they encountered and how they were changed along the way.
Irreductionism is evidently a risky project. To engage in it, “[a]ll the literary resources that can be mustered to render an account lively, interesting, perceptive, suggestive and so on have to be present” (Latour 1988b: 170). It requires a style that meets a simple criterion for success: does the account add anything to the world I thought I knew? Does it give a richer account than the stories I have heard before? To paraphrase Foucault (1994: 3.540–1), does it “make evident what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to us, that because of that we did not perceive it?”
Laboratory Life was written to a large extent in the style of an ethnographic case study. Empirically oriented sociologists were familiar with this style and for that reason they may be excused for failing to see that Latour's aims and the semiotic methods that underpinned the analysis differed radically from both traditional sociology of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge. In The Pasteurization of France, Latour has shifted his attention from the production of scientific knowledge to the role of science and technology in society, to enable its readers to learn how through chains of translations a wide variety of actors, human as well as nonhuman ones, become defined and redefined. To do so, he had to follow the actants and to keep the evaluative repertoire of outsiders – sociologists and historians – at arm's length.
In Aramis or the Love of Technology, Latour's style became even more explicit than in The Pasteurization of France. The book is cleverly and elegantly staged as a Bildungsroman. A young engineering student who wanted to spend a year at the École des Mines in sociology is introduced. He is asked to study Aramis, a French high-tech automatic train system – a smart combination of private cars and public transport in which cars that carry a small number of passengers are coupled to form a train, to be uncoupled at the right spot to bring the passengers to their preferred destination. After a very promising start, up to the point where the French Prime Minister enjoyed riding in one of its prototypes, Aramis was buried without fanfare. Who had killed Aramis? In the course of his attempts to answer this question, the student learns what technology and society are made of. How does he learn this? By collecting and analysing documents with technical details and evaluation reports, by conducting interviews with engineers and policy-makers, and by listening to the reflexive comments of his professor. Out of these fragments, the student reconstructs the world of and around Aramis. Like an archaeologist, from scattered splinters of the past, he constructs how content (‘technology’) and context (‘society’) co-develop. He comes to understand that Aramis is not a thing ‘out there’ that was killed by social forces (Capitalism, the Communist Party, Bureaucracy, or Economic Interests) that had been waiting in the dark to kill off Aramis. He comes to know that a properly functioning, stable public transport system requires for its subsistence a large network of both human and nonhuman actants that translate each other. And he discovers why this complex, fragile, hybrid being eventually disintegrated: it was not loved enough.
How do we, as readers of Latour's book, learn all of this? In the same way: by constructing a plot out of the fragments in the book. The literary form of the book supports its content. The book follows the student on his trips, provides the documents he has collected, excerpts of his interviews, the reflections of his professor. The various sources are distinguished by their typography. By selecting a clever, and very engaging format of writing, Latour tackles the problems usually framed as ‘problems of method’, to show the world of technology, our modern world, in a way we had failed to see before.
Science and technology studies showed the heuristic power of Latour's ontology, his vocabulary and ethnographic approach. Although he would continue to conduct ethnographies of science and technology (SA; PH; CB), in the 1990s, Latour began to explore the consequences of the successes of science and technology studies in wider domains. He set out to question the underlying assumptions of social science and of the mainstream of Western philosophy, and to address what he conceived as the main problem the world faces: the global ecological crisis.
Arguing that to understand the world we live in, social science (RAS) and our self-image as people who have a modern, rationalized worldview have to be revised (NBM), and that the values that we claim to hold dear need to be redescribed (AIME), Latour gradually turned into a public intellectual.