Bruno Latour
1) Biography:
Emeritus professor Bruno Latour was recently connected to Sciences Po Paris’ médialab and SPEAP programme in political arts. Along with being the curator of Critical Zones at ZKM (which opened in August 2020), he and Martin Guinard were also in charge of the Taipei Biennale of Art (opened October 2020). He is a member of various academies and was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2021 as well as the Holberg Prize in 2013. More than thirty books, as well as more than 150 articles, have been authored and edited by him.
Born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, to a family of wine growers, he received his education in philosophy before going on to study anthropology. He served as a professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris from 1982 to 2006, and from 2006 to 2017 he served as vice president for research at Sciences Po Paris.
He became an expert in the analysis of scientists and engineers in action after doing field research in Africa and California. In addition to his work in science anthropology, philosophy, history, sociology, and management, he has contributed to numerous studies on science policy. He is the author of The Pasteurization of France, Science in Action, and Laboratory Life.
He also wrote an essay on symmetrical anthropology and a field study on an autonomous subway system called Aramis or the Love of Technology. We’ve never been contemporary. In order to examine the effects of the “science wars,” he has also compiled a collection of articles called Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies. He wrote a book on the political philosophy of the environment, Politics of Nature, after supervising multiple theses on various environmental crises.
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech, and Paris ville invisible, a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects of the city of Paris are just a few of the books in which he explores the effects of science studies on various traditional topics in the social sciences. He also explores social theory in these books. He released a monograph titled The Making of Law – an Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat after conducting extensive fieldwork on one of the French top Courts.
Reassembling the Social, an Introduction to Actor Network Theory, by Oxford University Press, is a new version of the social theory he and his Parisian colleagues have created. He wrote Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime in 2018 and Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime in 2015 as his interest in political ecology increased.
After co-curating Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art, a significant international exhibition in Karlsruhe at the ZKM centre, he also co-curated Making Things Public The atmospheres of democracy in October 2005.
While at Sciences Po, he founded the médialab to take advantage of the opportunity presented to social theory by the adoption of digital methods. He also founded, along with Valrie Pihet, the new experimental programme in art and politics (SPEAP), which is now under the direction of Frédérique Ait-Touati. He was involved in the ongoing AIME project from 2011 to 2014 after receiving an ERC grant to further his investigation into modalities of existence.
2) Main Works:
Laboratory Life:
An anthropological analysis of Roger Guillemin’s research lab at the Salk Institute is presented in this significant work in the subject of science studies. It makes a number of advancements in terms of observations about how scientific work is carried out, such as explanations of the intricate relationship between the routine lab procedures carried out by scientists, the publication of papers, scientific prestige, research funding, and other aspects of laboratory life.
The Pasteurization of France:
In this work, Latour makes the case that the historical convergence of opposing social forces and conflicting objectives must be considered in order to fully comprehend the success of the biologist, Pasteur, and his technique. However, Pasteur was not the only scientist researching the connections between germs and illness. How did he get the other forces to rally around his research? Latour depicts Pasteur’s attempts to persuade the French populace, including farmers, businesspeople, politicians, and a large portion of the scientific community. Latour attempts to demonstrate how society and its scientific facts are built concurrently, rather than reducing science to a certain social milieu.
We Have Never Been Modern:
The book examines the dualistic division modernity generates between nature and society as a “anthropology of science.” Latour contends that pre-modern peoples did not make such distinctions. A tidy nature/culture duality is no longer feasible in light of the way that contemporary issues of public concern—such as global warming, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and developing biotechnologies—mix politics, science, popular culture, and expert discourse. Post-modern and anti-modern movements have emerged as a result of this contradiction. Latour contends that the modernist division between nature and culture never existed in an effort to reunite the social and natural worlds.
Aramis, or the Love of Technology:
The quasi-mystery in the book seeks to identify Aramis’ murderer (personal rapid transit). Aramis was intended to be put into use in Paris as a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system. While looking at Aramis’s demise, Latour also outlines the principles of actor-network theory. According to Latour, the players failed to maintain the technology through negotiation and adaptation to a shifting social environment, not because any one actor killed it.
Pandora’s Hope:
Bruno Latour was directly questioned by a scientist friend: “Do you believe in reality?” Latour is perplexed by this unexpected inquiry and provides his thorough response in Pandora’s Hope. It is a compelling case for seeing the practical application of scientific reality.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
The Constitution:
Humanism is frequently used to characterise modernity, either as a method to celebrate or mourn the passing of “man.” However, this practise itself is modern because it ignores the concurrent emergence of “nonhumanity” – things, objects, or creatures. The constitution is the topic at hand in his work. Latour queries, “Who is to write the full constitution?”. This is typically done by jurists and the Founding Fathers for political constitutions, and by scientists for the nature of things. But who will draught the entire constitution if we also wish to include hybrids? To distinguish it from the political constitution, Latour refers to this entire document as the “Constitution” with a capital C. The definition includes information on people and nonhumans, their traits and relations, their skills and classifications.
Hobbes and Boyle:
Latour uses the argument between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as an illustration of the division between science and politics. Boyle is regarded as the father of contemporary science since he invented the method for seeing an artificially created phenomena in a lab setting.
While Hobbes concentrated on explaining social and political order in terms of human conflicts and agreements, this method of analysis was rejected by Hobbes. Boyle and Hobbes collaborated to create a plan for eradicating the traces of one another from both the discourses of nature and society. They are inventing our modern world, a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract, according to Latour, who claims that this division between science and politics is not just typical of “modernity,” but actually defines it.
We Have Never Been Modern:
Latour claims that modernity has never begun. Instead, he refers to himself as a “nonmodern” and states that they are anyone who simultaneously takes into account the moderns’ Constitution and the population of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and permits to proliferate. According to him, hybrids—also known as monsters, cyborgs, and tricksters—constitute just about everything; they construct not just our own collectives but also the others, falsely referred to as premodern. Therefore, Latour claims, only very slight differences exist between our era and the eras that came before.
Quasi-objects:
By initially challenging the position of the social scientist, Latour attempts to pinpoint the positions of hybrids, quasi-objects, and quasi-subjects. According to him, social scientists demonstrate that things like “the power of gods, the objectivity of money, and the lure of fashion (…)” have no intrinsic value and instead provide simply a surface for the projection of our social demands and interests. A social scientist is someone who understands that the intrinsic qualities of objects do not count, that they are merely receptacles for human categories, according to Latour. Social scientists, however, disprove the notion that people are free agents, demonstrating how the “nature of things (…) determines, informs, and moulds” people.
Thus, according to Latour, a social scientist “see[s] double.” Objects have no significance in the first denunciation; they are merely there to serve as the white screens on which society projects its cinema. The social construction of the sciences that created them is undetectable in the second case, where they are so potent that they alter human society.
Dualism is the answer to these incompatible ideas, much to Latour’s displeasure. The subject/society pole is separated into “hard” and “soft” halves in the same way that the nature pole is. Although dualism may not be the best approach, it did supply the majority of the social sciences’ analytical toolkit. Contrarily, Latour contends that things are also producers of society. Isn’t society actually constructed of gods, machines, sciences, arts, and fashions, not metaphorically, said Latour. He believes that since dialectics emphasise the already-existing dichotomies, we shouldn’t concentrate too much on them. Instead, we should pay attention to quasi-objects.
Quasi-objects are located between and beneath the two poles and are significantly more social, synthesised, and collective than the ‘hard’ components of nature, [yet] they are also significantly more real, nonhuman, and objective than those formless screens on which society (…) needed to be “projected.” Science studies have compelled everyone to reassess the function of objects in the building of collectives, therefore confronting philosophy, by emphasising the two poles rather than that which is in the middle.
Relativism:
Latour discusses anthropology’s purpose and potential contributions, as well as the ideas of symmetry and asymmetry. The anthropologist must position himself at the midpoint where he can track the attribution of both nonhuman and human attributes if anthropology is to become symmetrical. Anthropology needs, in Latour’s words, “return home from the tropics” in order to analyse this new area of research.
He claims that anthropology should, first of all, use the same terms to explain truths and errors, second, study the production of humans and nonhumans simultaneously, and third, refrain from making any a priori declarations as to what might distinguish Westerners from Others. This passage is aptly titled “There Are No Cultures.” Latour also emphasises the idea of symmetry, which he defines as a symmetry between non-human creatures and humans in which the latter have the same agency as humans.
4) His Legacy:
On October 9, 2022, a French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist who was well-known throughout the world passed away. He influenced a new generation of intellectuals, artists, and activists with his views on climate change. Latour is well-known outside of France, having won the Holberg Prize (2013) and the Kyoto Prize (2021) for his body of work, but he was initially misinterpreted there because his study topics seemed so disparate despite their strong underlying coherence. With his ground breaking and explosive investigations on laboratory life, he touched on practically every subject of knowledge, including environmentalism, law, modernity, religion, and, of course, science and technology.
Over the course of his 50-year career, he made contributions to a variety of topics, including religion, sociology, art, and anthropology, which in turn had an impact on literary theory and business management. But one theme throughout all of his writing: that knowledge is produced and expanded inside intricate webs of individuals, ideas, and things rather than being in a vacuum outside of society.
Dr. Latour published several works in the previous ten years, including “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime” (2018) and “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime” (2017). He made the case in them that the epistemic shock sweeping the globe today was comparable to the one that transformed Western culture between the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.
In a statement posted on the Kyoto Prize website in 2021, he stated, “This time, however, it is not the discovery of an infinite universe and the possibility of expanding the resources for prosperity and development”. The finding of a small, vulnerable, and endangered region of the Earth, or what geochemists refer to as the “critical zone,” correlates to the tiny portion that has been altered by living things throughout ages, Latour further states.
In his acceptance address for the Kyoto Prize, he spoke on the complex interactions between the coronavirus pandemic, globalisation, and climate change as well as the messy real-time consequences of the fast-moving epidemiological study on Covid and vaccines. Science “is no longer the view from nowhere,” he declared.
