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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled ObjectsAuthor(s): Roger LuckhurstSource: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006),pp. 4-17Published by: SF-TH IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241405 .
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4
SCIENCE FICTION
STUDIES,
VOLUME
33
(2006)
Roger
Luckhurst
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction:
Networks,
Assemblages,
and
Tangled
Objects
Bruno
Latour,
professor
at the Ecole
Nationale
Superieure
des Mines de
Paris,
has been a
controversial igure
in
science and
technology
studies for
twenty-five
years.
His work has hovered on the
edges
of critical
theory
in
the
humanities,
but has never
quite
been subsumed nto that
generic
French
theory
hat
Anglo-
American academies tend to construct.Instead,he has helpedrefashionSTS in
Franceand
America,
and the
influenceof his Science in
Action
(1987)
made
him
an
important
igure
in
the
so-called Science Wars of
the 1990s.
A
particular
methodology, Actor-Network
Theory
(ANT),
has been extracted
from this
early work,
although
Latourhimself has until
recently
been
reluctant o use
these
terms. Since his attack on the
philosophical
premises
of
(scientific) modernity
in
We
Have
Never Been Modern
(1993),
Latour's
work has
developed
wider
ambitions. He has
articulatedhis
project
as
aiming
to visit
successively
and to
document the
different truth
production
sites that
make
up
our
civilisation
(Crease 18).
Having
focused on the
construction of truth in
science
and
technology
and on the
sociology
of
science,
he has
recently
moved
rapidly
through
philosophy,
law, religion, art
(co-curating
he
exhibition
Iconoclash
in
2002),
and academic
critique.1
This is a
reflection of his
multi-disciplinary
training-he has
always
combined
participant-observation
nthropology
with
the
sociology
and
philosophy
of
science,
blending empirical
case
studies with
contentious
reformulationsof
method.
But this
mix
is also a
mark of his
desire
to shake
up
the
fixed
grids of
disciplines formedin the university by a modernsettlement n which he no
longer
believes. Instead,
Latour
pursues new
and
surprising
assemblages of
knowledge,
in
part
because he
insists
that the
world is
not safely
divided
between
society
and
science, politics and
nature, subjects
and
objects, social
constructions
and
reality,
but
rather is
populated
increasingly by
strange
hybrids-what
he
variously calls
risky
attachments or
tangled
objects
(Politics
22)-that
cut
across these
divides and
demandnew
ways
of thinking.
A
witty and
elegant
stylist, Latour
has
proposed that
the
hybrid genre
that I
have designed
for a
hybridtask
is what
I call
scientifiction
(Aramis
ix). He
ratherdelightfully has no awarenessthat this was Hugo Gernsback'soriginal
coinage,
in
1929, for what
became science
fiction,
but then he has
little
to say
directly
about
the
genre, which he
passingly
dismisses as
inadequate
or his
method
(Aramis viii).
Nevertheless,
this short
introduction
will
explore how
Latour's
work can
open a
number of
productive
fronts for sf
scholarship,
transvaluing eneric
knowledgein
general, butalso
proving
particularly
helpful
in
theorizing recent
hybrid
genre
fictions.
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BRUNOLATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION
5
Of ANTs and Men.
In the
early part
of his
career,
Latour's central
aim,
in
common with other historians
and
sociologists
of
science,
was to
use
various
strategies
to
resituate
science and
technology
in their
perceived
relations
to
the
social world.
Science,
as formulated
slowly
in the West
by
the
scientific
revolutions
from
the seventeenth
o nineteenth
centuries,
was
rarely
interested
in its
own
history except
as a record of error
progressively
excluded
from
the
production
of truth. Social factors
only
ever
appear
n these traditional
cientific
accounts
to
explain
error. False
religious
belief, smuggled
into a
leaky
and
amateurish
aboratory, produce
incorrect
objects
like
telepathy
or
ESP;
false
ideological biases create instances ike
Lysenkoism.
Once these social intrusions
are
excluded, falsehood
is eliminated
and
the
proper path
to truth s
regained.
Good science is thereforebeyond anysocial influences. This divideof socialand
technical
knowledge produces,
for
Latour,
a
damagingpolitical configuration.
The
social
practice
of
Western
democracy
s
always
limited
by
an absoluteout-
side-Nature-to which
only
the scientific
expert
has
privileged
access,
and
whose facts are
beyond dispute.
One
can
have
as
many
different cultural
accounts as one
likes,
but
this
multiculturalism
s
only
ever
flotsam on the
sea
of
mononaturalism.
The
overlaid binaries of
social/scientific, political/natural,
subject/object,
value/fact
work,
Latour
laims,
to
render
ordinary,political
ife
impotent hrough
he threatof
incontestableNature
(Politics 10).
Latour developed three early strategies to contest this modern scientific
constitution. The first derived from
anthropology.
His
first
book,
Laboratory
Life
(a
collaboration
with
Steve
Woolgar [1979]), was the
productof two
years
of
participant-observation
n
an
American
laboratory.
Reversing
the usual
directionof the
anthropologist
rom center
to
margin,
and
directing he scientific
gaze
at science
itself,
Latour absorbed himself in
the
tribe of
laboratory
scientiststo
collect fieldworkon
the
routinely
occurring
minutiae
of
everyday
laboratorybehavior(Lab
Life 27).2
The
material
collected
contested the
image
of the
laboratory
as a
sterile,
inhuman
place, showing
that
he
practice
of
science
widely regardedby outsiders as well organised, logical, and coherent, in fact
consists of a
disordered
array
of
observations
with
which
scientists struggle to
produce order
(Lab Life
36). Some of Latour's
central
claims emerged from
this
work. The
laboratory
s a
place
saturatedwith
the social and
political, and
the technical
cannot be
artificially divorced from
these concerns, at
least in the
process
of
doing science. The
divide is
instituted later, for instance
in the
retrospective
reconstructionof
laboratory
practice in the
scientific research
paper.
Those
incontestable
scientific facts or
essences are
not waiting to be
uncovered,
but
are the
end
result of long and
laborious
procedures
that are
messy andconfusing.
Yet
Latour's point is
misunderstood f he is
seen as merely arguing
for the
social
construction of
science.
He
develops a critique of
semioticians who
uphold
an
absolutedivide between
world and
word, reality
and anguage. Latour
argues
that
the
laboratory
s
a
configurationof machines
(Lab Life
65), a
multiple, overlapping set
of
tracking devices that
transcribe and
translate
material
substances nto
grids, graphs, logbooks,
codings,
diagrams,equations,
and
language.
The
cultural
relativist
might saythatthe
objective reality
referred
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6
SCIENCE
ICTION
TUDIES,
VOLUME 3
(2006)
to is an end product of
these
transcriptions,
but Latour will later
develop
the
point that
in
this
complex array
of
inscription
of
the real into
signification,
we
never detect the rupture between things and signs and we never face the
impositionof arbitrary
and
discrete
signs
on
shapeless
and continuousmatter
(Pandora's Hope 56).
Latour
wants to
challenge
the
rejection
of social and
culturalfactors
in
science,
but
he is
equally
concerned
to
reject
facile accounts
thatreduce everything
n
science to social constructionor mattersof
representa-
tion and
interpretation.
For
Latour,
this
merely
reverses the
polarity
of the
insidious object/subject
divide,
and his later work aims to
think
about
a
new
dispensation
that cuts across
this, by
talking
about alliances
of
humans and
nonhumans see
next
section, below).
Latourcontinues o use the methodsof fieldwork, suggestingthat t canopen
multiple
rontsof
critique
n
addition o la tradition
philosophique
des
commen-
taires
de texts
(Monde
Pluriel
6;
the
philosophical
tradition of
textual
commentary ).
The second
strategy
of contestationcomes from the
history
of
science. Scientific
practice
is
often
presentist, proceeding by
the erasure of
incorrect
assumptions,
rival
hypotheses,
and
wrong turns.
A
general
tactic to
resocialize science has been to recover the social of
history
of truth
(to
use
Steven
Shapin's phrase).
This
historicist tactic looks at
exemplary
nstancesof
the institutionaland
ideological
formation of scientific
naturalism,
scientific
controversies(treating winners and losers symmetrically),or instancesof
lost or abandoned heories. Latourborrowedmuch
of the methodof the
English
historians and sociologists of science sometimes called the
EdinburghSchool,
and
published
The
Pasteurization of
France
in
1988.3
In
this
study,
Louis
Pasteur's
genius
is
analytically decomposed: he
is
no
longer
the heroic
discoverer of the microbial
transmissionof disease
againstunenlightened
ivals
in
the mid-nineteenth
entury,
but is
the master of
strategicallycombining
his
laboratory findings
with
a vast array of different
elements and
interests that
stretch far
beyond
his closed vacuum
flasks.
In
order for
his
theory
to win
out,
Pasteur binds together a set of interests that include farmers, army doctors,
Louis
Bonaparte,hygienists, newspapers, French
nationalism,the
bureaucrats
of
the Second
Empire,
cows,
industrialists,popular and specialistjournals,
transport xperts,
and
the FrenchAcademy, as
well as the
microbesthemselves.
This sort of
sociological
history
of
science has become very familiar (it has
partly dislodged
the
heroic,
internalistscientific
biography,for
instance). Yet
the
apparently chaotic
listing
of
Pasteur's interests,
breaching all apparent
categorization
or
ordering,
has become
Latour's
signaturedevice. Elsewhere,
he lists some of
the interests at
play
in
the crisis
around he
outbreakof mad
cow disease in Europe, including he EuropeanUnion, the beef market,prions
in
the
laboratory,
politicians,vegetarians,public
confidence, farmers,andNobel
prize-winning
French
scientists. Does this list sound
heterogeneous? Latour
asks.
Too bad-it is
indeed this
power to establish a
hierarchy among
incommensurable
ositions for which the
collective must now
take responsibil-
ity
(Politics 113). This listing is the mark
of Latour'sthird
strategyto contest
the
modern
scientific
settlement: he
actor-network.
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BRUNO
LATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION
7
The
Pasteurisation
of France
is the
book-length
concrete
example
that
enacted
the
theory
worked out
in
Latour's most
important
arly
book,
Science
in Action
(1987).
In
this,
Latour
races how a
scientist
might
succeed
enough
to
make
a
proposition
into a
black
box,
a
statement
fixed
as
an
uncontested
scientific
fact,
with
any
history
of contest
or
controversy
in its
production
completely
erased.
He starts with the small-the
rhetoric
of
the
scientific
paper-and
builds a model that
incorporates
more and more
elements:
the
laboratory, colleagues,
funders
from
industry,
government,
or the
military,
machines,
technology
transfers,
other
sciences,
the
educated
public,
the
uneducated
public,
the
press,
and so on. As
before,
the aim is
to show
that
science is
thoroughly
ocialized and
produced
hrough
heterogeneous
hains
of
association : We are neverconfrontedwith science, technology, andsociety,
but with a
gamut
of weaker
and
stronger
associations
(Science
in Action 100-
101).
Althoughthis
deliberately
ntermixes
elements,
Latour s careful
to
argue
that a
successful statementalso
needs to form a
disciplinary
structure,
a
policed
realm
of
experts and
expertise,
an
inside and
an
outside. He
does not break
down
the conditions for
rigorous
scientific
knowledge;
however,
inverting
received
wisdom, he claims that the
harder,
the
purerthe science is
inside,
the
furtheroutside the
scientists have
to
go
(Science
in Action
156).
There is
no
such
thing
as
pure
cience,
because these are the
laboratories
hathave to seek
the most funding, the most governmental and industrial support. Big
technoscience
only survives
by
connecting
itself to the
state and the
military:
technoscience s
partof
a
war machine
and shouldbe
studiedas
such
(Science
in
Action
172).
Science
is
therefore successful
not to
the degree that
it isolates
itself
from
society, but to
the
degree that it
creates
networks and
multiplies
connections,
and to
the extent
that
it
can be
assessed
by the number
of points
linked, the
strength and
length
of the
linkage, the
nature of the
obstacles
(Science
in
Action
201). The
starkest
symbol of
Latour's
rejection of
asocial
theories of
science is how
he
presents the
equation
or formula:
the
purest,
compressedstatementof incontestable ndunchanging act to some, the equation
is for
Latoura
knot,
somethingthat
succeeds
because it is so
well
connected,
tightly
binding
together as it
does the maximum
heterogeneous
elements into a
single
enunciation.
The
network s
figuredby
Latour
hroughmetaphors
f
knots and oops.
One
of
his
most lucid
expositions of
what
elements need
to be
addressed
when
considering any
scientific
concept (a term
he
often replaces
with
knot ) s a
passage
in
Pandora's
Hope
(1999).
Buildingon the
assertion
hat t]he truth
of
what
scientists
say no
longer comes
from
their breaking
away
from society,
conventions, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the
circulating
references that
cascade
througha great
numberof
transformations
and
translations
Pandora 97),
Latour ists the
five
minimal oops
that need
to
be
traced:
first,
mobilizationof
the
world, which is the
complex, variegated
set
of
processes
for
transporting
objects from
the
real world into
scientific
discourse;
second,
autonomization,
which is the way
a
discipline moves
from
amateur
to
professional,
forming its own
criteria and
expertise for
scientific
knowledge
along the
way; third,
alliances, which
reverse
autonomysince
here
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8
SCIENCE
ICTION
TUDIES,
VOLUME
3
(2006)
diverse, extra-scientific
interests are enrolled n the
support
of a
particular
science
(kings
in
cartography,
ndustrialists
n
chemistry,
the
military
n
atomic
physics, and
so on); fourth,public
representation,
ince
scientistswho had to
travel the world to make it
mobile,
to convince
colleagues
to
lay
siege
to
ministers and boards
of
directors,
now have
to take care of their relations
with
another
outside world
of civilians:
reporters,
pundits,
and the man and
woman
in the
street
(Pandora105);
finally,
the knotof the scientific
concept itself,
harderto
study yet part
of this
topology
because it is a
very
tight
knot at
the
centre of a net
(Pandora 06).
These ideas
helped
form Actor-Network
Theory.
This is
not
solely
identified
with
Latour, and its
origins
are often
ascribed o a
joint
paper
Latour
wrote with
Michel Callon in 1981, entitled Unscrewingthe Big Leviathan. ANT has
since been taken
up by
some
English
sociologists,
such as John
Law,
who sees
its
value in the
productive ensionbetween the
centeredactor and the
decentered
network,
enabling the critic to move
across different scales of
explanation.4
Subsuming
Latour into the
familiar
post-structuralism
of
Lyotard
and
Deleuze/Guattari,Lawregards
ANT
as
a semiotic machinefor
waging
war on
essential
differences
(7).
Latour has been
rather more
circumspect:
he has
registeredhis
suspicionof the terms Actor
(he prefers
the term
actant,
since this
might also include
nonhumans),
Network
(which risks
becoming
a dead
metaphor,a statictopologyor gridrather hansomethingdynamically orged by
science
in
process),
and
Theory (which
Latour
claims to avoid
as it would
constrainhis
ethnomethodology f
following
actors
in
each
fresh
situation).
He
even
suspects
the
hyphen etween
Actor-Network as
fixing a
binary between
individual
agency and
systemic
forces that he
wished to
displace (see On
Recalling
ANT ).
Latourhas not
been able to kill
off the term-a
lesson
perhaps
thata single
actorcannot
necessarilycontrolthe
network-and has
more
recently
embraced it
fully,
publishing
Reassembling he Social
(2005), his
first
introductory xposition
of ANT. For
Latourthe main
tenet of
ANT is that
the actors themselvesmakeeverything, includingtheir own frames, theirown
theories, their own
contexts, their
own
metaphysics
( On
Using ANT 67).
All
of
Latour's work in
Science
in Actionand
beyond
might seem an
aggressive,
counter-intuitive
ociological theoryof
science,
intent
on
dethroning
scientific
legitimacy.
In
fact
Latour
claims it is a form of
almost
naive realism:
as his
comments
about
ANT
suggest, he
claims
he has imposed
nothing,
but has
merely
followed
scientific actors
themselves,
trackinghow they
behave,
andthe
connections and
networksthat
they create.
Embedded n
all of Latour's
work is
a
strong critique
of
sociological
and
critical
schools that
seek social
explana-
tions of science. Latourdoes notwish to fashionexplanations hatdecode what
his
actors do.
He is opposed
to the
attempt to
demystify or
expose real
conditions as a
Marxist
might,
and
distances
himself from
sociologies
thathave
the
arrogant
belief that
they can
explain
the actors any
better
than the actors
themselves.
For
Latour,
the
social as a
term of
explanation needs
to be
rethought: t is not a
sort of
ether that invisibly
permeateseverything
else as a
hidden
context, but is
the
resultof the
associations or
links that bind
together
scientific,
political, cultural,
economic,
and other
practices.
He appeals to a
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BRUNO
LATOUR'S
CIENTIFICTION
9
sociology of associations
to
replace
all critical
sociologies
that use
predeter-
mined categories
for
determining
ocial
groups.
Each social
object
is a
specific
set
of associations that
produces
its
own terms
of
analysis.
This approachhas the
pragmatist's
air of the distrustof
any
system,
and
indeed Latour has more than once
appealed
to the work of
William James
to
supporthis own
position.
Yet
pragmatism
can often be
a
faux-naif
stance,
designed
to disable
critics. Latour's
work
has
undoubtedly
become
more
explicitly
political,
and he
has
taken
aim
at the
political
conservatism
nherent
in
the
ideological
constructof
Science wielded
in
the Science Wars of the
1990s.
In
Politics
of Nature
(2004),
Latourwants to
liberate the
practice
of
the
(lower
case,
plural)
sciences
from
the
ideological
stranglehold
f
(capitalized,
singular)
Science. This will
accomplish
nothing
ess thanthe
revitalizationof
democracy,
and
may
even
solve the clash of
fundamentalisms etween East and
West,
as
explored
in
his reaction to the
events
of
September
11,
War
of
the
Worlds
(2002).
This
peace-making desire
is
perhaps
a
response
to
Donna
Haraway's
observation that
Latour's
method and view of
scientific
practice
in
Science in
Action was
insistently war-like:
science
works
by
strenuous
battles
to
win
controversies
and outflank
rivals,
to marshal
armies,
and so on.
The
heroic,
masculinist
narrative
of
science was
being
unwittinglyrepeated
by
Latour:
The
story told is told
by
the
same
story (Modest_Witness 4). This is acute: after
all,
the
French title
of Latour's
book
on
Pasteur
might
have been
more
literally
translated
as
lThe
Microbes: War
and Peace. Yet
Latour's irenic
turn
in
the
1990s is
attributable ot
just to
Haraway's
critique,
but also
to the
influence
of
the French
philosopher
and historian
of science
Michel
Serres,
who in a
book-
length interview with
Latour
spoke
of
working
in
a
spirit
of
pacifism
against
the
contest of the
faculties
(Serres 32).
Finally,
though, his turn
to the
political
was driven
by the
challenge
Latour
mounted
n
We
Have
Never
BeenModem
to
the
war
set
up between
subjects
and objects
by the modern
settlement.Let's
now
turnto this importantpolemical intervention.
The Modern
Settlement
and Latour's
Nonmodernism.
Fromhis
early
books,
we
already have a
sense
that Latour
regards
the scientific
revolutions of
the
seventeenth
century as
a
very
particular
organization of
the
world.
This is
formulatedas
the modern
constitution
or
settlement
in We
Have
Never Been
Modem,
a
separation
of
Nature and
Culture
into two
distinct
ontologies;
according to
Latour,
modernity
works
obsessively
at
purification, the
categorizing
of the
world
according
to a
binary
that sorts
humans from
nonhumans,
ubjects rom
objects. A
politics
emergesfrom
this
dispensation
hat
is inflexibleandoftenviolent:nature s to be dominated;othercultures,
refusing
to
accept
the
disciplining of
the
progressive, linear
time
of
modernity,
are
regardedas
objects, sunk in
nature.Savages
and
superstitionsmix
thesocial
and
the natural
indiscriminately;
science
progressively
separates
these
spheres.
Modernisation
onsists in
continually
exiting
from an
obscure
age that
mingled
the
needs of
society with
scientific
truth n
order
to
enter intoa
new age
thatwill
finally
distinguish
clearly what
belongs to
atemporal
nature
and
what comes
from
humans
(We
Have
Never 71).
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10 SCIENCE ICTION
TUDIES,VOLUME
3 (2006)
For
Latour, this modem
constitutionhas
always operated
mperfectly:
it
is
involved in
a doublecreation
of a social context and a nature hat
escapes
that
very context (16), andyet regardsNature(the guarantorof scientific truth)as
pre-given
andextra-discursive.
f
Natureand
Culture
are
co-produced,however,
they
are
in
constant contact and
dialogue, conducting
endless
translationsand
mediations. The
fury
of
purification
s driven
by
a secret
history
of
miscegena-
tion,
of the
intermixing
of
categories.
We have
never been modem.
Latour
argues
that
this realization
has been
thrust on us
by
recent
developments
that
confront
us
with a
rapid proliferation
of
hybrid
objects
that
confound
modem
categories. Are ozone
holes, global
warming,
AIDS, epidemics
of
obesity
and
allergy,
hospital
superbugs,
Asian bird
flu,
and
mad cow disease the
product
of
natural or cultural, human or nonhuman, processes? They cannot be
sorted -categorized
or
resolved-in
any straightforward
way.
Indeed,
in
the
case
of global
warming,
the
passage
to
black-boxed act is
continually
rustrated
and
scientific
argument
inextricably
intermingled
with
political, industrial,
ecological, and
myriad
other
interests. We have
moved from
mattersof
fact
to
mattersof
concem,
situating
he
practice
of
science
in
wider
networksand
longer
chains of association.
This
transitionhas been
discussedby some
critics as the
passage
from an era
of Science
to one of
Research,
a move from
autonomy
to the
imbricationof
science, culture, andeconomy: all these domains had become so 'intemally'
heterogeneousand
'externally'
nterdependent,
ven
transgressive,
hat
hey
had
ceased to
be distinctive
and
distinguishable
Nowotny et al.
1). Latoursees it
as the
recognition
of
the
very
hybridity
hat was
always
induced
by the modem
settlement.
Hybrid
objects
have no clear
boundaries,
no
sharp separation
between
their own
hard kemel
and their
environment,
he
expands
in
Politics
of
Nature:
They
first
appear
as
mattersof
concern,
as new
entities
thatprovoke
perplexity
and thus
speech
in
those
who
gather
around
them,
and
argue over
them
(Politics
24, 66).
He
suggests
we
need
a
re-formulationof
the
binaries
thatrecognizes this increasinglypopulousexcludedmiddle, a space inwhich we
need
to
graspthe
nonseparability
f
quasi-objects nd
quasi-subjects (WeHave
Never
139). This
would
in
turn
produce a
new
constitutionand
thereforea new
politics:
It
is
time,
perhaps,
to
speak
of
democracyagain, but
of
a
democracy
extended to
things
themselves
(We
Have Never
141).
Latour's
polemic appeared
at
the time
when
many critical
accounts of
modemity were
being producedunderthe
umbrellaof
postmodernism.
Some of
his
formulationsmight look
postmodern-perhaps most
obviously the
idea that
abandoning
the
linear time of
modernity
will
open up
multiple,
co-existent
times.5 Yet Latour is scathingabout the postmodern urn. Whether it is Jean-
Francois
Lyotard's
collapse of
metanarrativesinto
the
petits
recits
of
incommensurable anguage
games
or
JiirgenHabermas's
argumentagainst the
postmodernsfor a
return to
separate
spheres of
knowledge,
Latour
considers
these
as
desperate
rearguard
ctions to
maintain
he purification
hat
dominated
the modern
settlement. The
modish
Jean
Baudrillard
xemplifies for Latoura
pointless
picking
over
the ruins
of the
modern,
incapableof
conceiving
any other
dispensationand
sunk
in
nihilism. In
this
decadent
phase, Latour
worries that
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BRUNO LATOUR'S
SCIENTIFICTION
11
critique has
collapsed
into extreme
relativism
or
conspiracy
theory ( Why
Has
Critique Run Out of Steam?
228).
He
sees this as
sharing
much with
a
regressive anti-modernview that is prepared o annihilateall the virtues of the
Enlightenment
long
with
its
vices.
Instead, Latour
declares
himself a
nonmodernist: We
can
keep
the
Enlightenmentwithout
modernity We
Have Never
135).
This
stance
crucially
involves making the
subject/object
divide far
more
porous,
and
rethinking
and
extendingmodem
humanism,
which has sorted
according
to a small
number
of
powers,
leaving
the rest
of the
world with
nothing
but
simple
mute forces
(We
Have
Never
138).
The constitutionneeds to be
reconfigured
so that
humansand
nonhumansare networked
ogether
in
a new kind of
collective. This collective
hasbeenenvisionedby Latour nPolitics of Nature,where democracy anonly
be conceived
if
it can
freely
traversethe borderbetween science and
politics,
in
order to add a series
of new voices
to
the
discussion
... the
voices of
nonhumans 69). That
compulsive need
of
the moderns
to
purify
is
not
simply
dissolved
(it
is still
helpful
to
have these
categories),
but the
nonmodernist
values acts of
linkage,
association,
and
heterogeneous
assemblage:
We shall
always o
from
hemixed o
the
still
more
mixed,
rom he
complicated
to the still more
complicated....We no
longer xpect
rom
he future hat t will
emancipate
s fromall our
attachments;n the
contrary,we expect
hat
t
will
attachus withtighterbonds o the morenumerousrowdsof alienswho have
become
ully-fledged
members
f
the collective.
Politics
191)
This
is
the maturevision of Latour's
later work.
Criticism of Latour's work is
often tied to
methodologicalquestions
in
the
sociology
of
science. The key
objection s termed
by SimonSchaffer
the
heresy
of
hylozoism,
an attribution
f
purpose,
will
and life to
inanimate
matter,
and
of human
nterests o the
nonhuman
182).
David Bloor
has
similarlyobjected,
in
much
harsher
erms,
to
Latour's
ransgression f the
foundational
hilosophi-
cal axioms of modernsociology (see also Elam). Latour'sdefense rangesfrom
the
disarmingly
honest
(he suggests to one
group
of
interviewers that
his
philosophicalapparatus
s
really not very
deep
[Crease 19]), to the
more
serious view
that Bloor's
sociology
quintessentially
belongs to the
modern
settlement
tself, relying
as it does
on the
strictKantian
divorce of
subjectiveand
objective
worlds that
Latour is
specifically
trying to
unravel ( For
David
Bloor ).
It is
of
course a
provocation o
talk about the
interests
or voices '
of
nonhumans,
and it is in
total conflict with
the
hermeneutics hat
still dominate
critique.
Yet
perhaps
readersof SFS
are less
traumatized
by this move
than the
philosophersof STS. Not only are we more familiar with interdisciplinary
formulations
of
post-humanism
(for
instance,
in
Donna
Haraway's recent
attempts
o
articulatea
companion pecies
kinship as part of a
wider
critique
of
modernity:
see her
Cyborgs
o
CompanionSpecies ),
but also
because the
fantasmatic
work of sf
has been
consistently
bound up with
imagining
the
interestsof
the
nonhuman,and
has been
fascinatedwith
theproductionof
those
hybrid forms the
modern
settlement
would deem
monstrous.
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12
SCIENCE
FICTION
STUDIES, VOLUME
33
(2006)
Implications for
SF.
I
hope
that this brief
survey
of
Latour's
work
has
already
begun to
spark
potential
ways
of
reading
sf,
even as his work
veers
across
both
the
forms
of
critique
and the
modern/postmodern
aradigm
hat
has tended
to
dominate
sf
criticism
in
recent times.
Here,
I
just
want to sketch
out
the
ways
in
which I
think
Latourcan
enable
new
directions
in
sf
scholarship.
First, it
is
obvious that
there
cannot
be a
Latourian
theory
that can
be
abstracted
and
subsequently applied
to
sf,
like
all those
theoretical
canning
factories that
process
the raw
material
of
sf and turn
it into the
product
of
a
particular
school.
Instead,
sf
can
be
thought
of as a link
that can
be tied into
many
different
kinds of
chains of association
or networks
of
influence,
sometimes
in
surprising
or
unpredictable
ways.
This
is how
it
appears
in
Latour's own
Aramis,
his
scientifictional
tudy
of
a
revolutionary ransport
project
for Paris
that failed in
the
1980s.
As
Mark
Bould
and
Sherryl
Vint
explore later
in
this
issue,
Aramis is
presented
in
a
cacophony
of
voices:
political,
industrial,
financial,
and
technological
interest
groups
are
cited
directly,
interspersed
with a
dialoguebetween
a
cynical
professor and
a
naive
STS
student;
this
cacophony
is
in turn
cut
across
by fragments
of
a
theory
of
technology,
along
with
lengthy
citations from
Mary
Shelley's
Frankenstein.
Shelley's proto-sf text
helps
Latour
imagine
the
way
in
which
large
technoscientific
projects
are
stitched
together
with
improvised
elements,
which
canthenescapedesignedintentionsanddeveloptheirown nonhuman ctions.
This
mythic
structure
was
also in
the
minds of
many
different
participants
n
the
Aramis
case: it
was
formative,
rather
than
secondary or
reflective. Sf
might
appear
ike this
in
other
stories: for
example,
in
the
oft-told
way that the
genre
contributed
formatively
to
the
military-scientific-industrial
roductionof
the
nuclear
bomb.
H.G.
Wells's The
World Set
Free
(1914)
was
one of
the
important
inks
in
Leo
Szilard's ardent
political
campaigning or an
American
atomic
program;
Wells
was
then
hooked
into a
very different
(and
in
the end
weaker)
networkof
resources
for the
atomic
scientists
lobbying
to stop
first-use
of the bomb, andthen for world governmentafterfirst-use.
We
might
also think
in
Latourian
ways
about
the weird
networks
of
connections that
produce
science-fictional
religions-one of the
more
striking
phenomena
associated with
the
genre
since
1945.
Hubbard's
Dianetics
took
resources from
experimental
psychology, the
discourse
of
the
American
engineer,
space-opera
plots, and John
W.
Campbell's
messianic
belief in
the
socially transformative
potential of sf.
The
Raelian
group
similarly
binds
together
genetics and
cloning with an
eschatology
borrowed
from
Arthur
C.
Clarke.
These
networks of
association
might be
weak,
thinly
populated,
and
definitively marginal, but Latour allows us to read how these bizarrely
heterogeneous
formations
operate. The
complex
socio-politico-scientific
embeddedness of
sf could be
considerably
clarified by
Latour's
approach
to
networks
and
assemblages,
chains
of
weaker and
stronger
association
thatcut
across
science,
technology, and
society.
Second,
and
consequently,
the
dynamic
topology of
the
network
does
something
to
displace
the
static
topographiesof
center
and
margin
or
high and
low.
It is
not
necessarily
useful to
dissolve these
categories
entirely
(there is
a
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BRUNO
LATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION
13
certain
rigidity
to the economics of
genre
publishing,
after
all),
but
they
might
be
regarded
as less
finally
determining
or sf.
Instead,
the
genre
might
be
seen
to intermix more
dynamically,
making
weaker
or
stronger
associations
across
the matrix
of
cultural
power.
Sometimes
sf
becomes
a
privileged
lens
through
which a lot of
social
processes
can be translated or the wider culture-as
in
cyberpunk
n
the 1980s (justat the time when sf
writers such as
Larry
Niven
and
JerryPournelle
successfully
connected nto the
circuitsof the New
Right
Reagan
administration).
At othertimes
sf
remains
marginal,decoupled
rom
mainstream
cultural formations and
with few kudos. This
marginality
can of
course
sometimes
generate
genuine
subcultural
energy
(as
in
the American
political
satires
of the
1950s
or
the
writings
of the
British Boom
in
the
1990s,
for
instance).
This
approachwould also be
interested
in
the
hybridizations
of
different
genres that
Gary Wolfe has called the
postgenre
fantastic
or
genre
implosion -the mixes of
Gothic,
thriller,
detective
fiction,
fantasy,
and
sf
that
have proliferated n
recent
years.
Sf criticism has been
somewhat
obsessed
with
purification,
with
the kind of
sorting
and
rigid categorization
Latour
argues
is
typical
of
the modem settlement.
Criticism, instead,
might
be
much more
interested
in
cross-fertilizations
between
genre
and
mainstream
writing
and
might judge
generic
transgressions ess
punitively.
If
we
read the
history
of sf
as nonmodernists, it might then appearthat the genre has never been mod-
ern-that it was
never a
pure form and
has
produced little
except
hybrid
writings (a
position
I
tried
to
argue
in
my
book
Science
Fiction). This
may
involve
dispensing
with
some of the
subcultural
essentiment
hatstill
attends he
genre.
Purism is
isolationism,
which
means fewer
connections and
therefore
weaker
cultural
nfluence.
Third, Latour's
sense that we
live
a
world of
proliferatinghybrids
might
actually
help
us read
recent sf.
Several
instances
spring
to
mind.
China
Mieville's New
Weird is a
fusion of
English
Gothic,
dark
fantasy,
and sf
traditions,andhis fictionsarefrequentlyorganizedaround pectacular et-pieces
of
hybrid
creaturesthat cut
across
received
categorizations.The
ichthyscaphoi
in
Iron
Council
(2004) is a
mongrel
of
whale-shark
distendedby
bio-thauma-
turgy
to
be
cathedral-sized,varicellate
shelled, metal
pipework thicker
than a
man in
ganglia
protruberant
ike prolapsed
veins,
boat-sized
fins
swinging on
oiled
hinges, a dorsal
row
of
chimneys smoking
whitely
(454). This
clatter of
adjectival
over-determination s
Mieville's
principal
strategy, and
reads
very
much
like
one of
Latour's
lists of
heterogeneous
elements,
combining
human,
animal,
and
machine.
A
similar
fascinationwith
hybridbeings
and
transformed
modes of categorization nformsJustinaRobson's Natural History(2003).
Yet
reading
sf
by means
of
Latour
does not
privilege
those hybrid
forms
usually associated
with
softer
sf.
Indeed, Latour's
insistent focus on
the
social
and
political
connections
of
scienceand
technology
alsomeans
he is
illuminating
in
reading
much hardersf
traditions.
An
exemplarytext
in this
regard
might be
Paul
McAuley's
White
Devils (2004),
which
is typical of
certaintrends n
many
ways. The
generic
location
of
McAuley's
novel is
extremely
difficult to
determine:
it
continues the
author's
move
from
space opera to
crossover
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14
SCIENCE ICTION
TUDIES,
VOLUME 3
(2006)
technothriller.
It
is a breathlessand kinetic low
entertainment,
but
one
studded
with
contemplative
passages
that
resonate
with Conrad's Heart
of
Darkness
(1902)
and Wells's Island
of
Doctor Moreau
(1896),
and it contains the
exorbitantviolence of the John Webster
revenge
tragedy
from which it takes
its
name.
McAuley
also slices
through
the
distinctionbetween hard and
soft
sf.
White
Devils
is
undoubtedly
hard sf: it is the kind of book
thatwants to
teach
the
reader
the
distinction between mitochondrialand
genomic
DNA,
and
its
imaginarysciences are
extrapolated
rom
currentbiotech research. Yet
it is
also
fascinated
with
subjectivity
and
traumatic
breaches
of
human
dentity,
the
kind
of
material long identified with soft sf. The
hybridization
of
these traditions
refuses to continue a
long
factional war-but
refuses,
in
Latourian
terms,
precisely because of theproductionof newhybrids hatrequireareconfiguration
of the
subject/object
or
human/nonhuman ivide.
WhiteDevils
explicitly
thematizeshow Science has
given
way
to an era
of
Research, presenting
a
messy
and confused world where the
laboratory
is
inextricably mixed with
politics,
aid
agencies,
and
open-source
late-stage
capitalism
(141).
The
pure
scientist
is
described
as
a relict
species....
You
exist in
a
marginal
environment.
Always you
must
struggle
for
funds,
scraps
of
endowments,
sponsorship,
and
always
you
must work
harder or
less
and ess....
The
nineteenth-century ulture of
science's Golden
Age
...
was
destroyed
(314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for heavily capitalized illicit
research,
released from
any regulationor
ethics.
It
has resulted n
the prolifera-
tion
of
hybrid
objects and new actants
hat cannot
easily be sorted
according
to
the
modem
settlement.
The
pandemic
of
the
plastic
disease,
for
example,
results from
gene
manipulation,so that
insects transport
material originally
designed
to make
hydrocarbons
n
plants:
in
the
last
stages
of
the
disease,
the
victims are turned nto
grotesque
iving statues,
paralysedbyhard, knotty
strings
and
lumps
of
polymer under
their skin
and
muscles
(24). The
inability to
distinguish
human
and nonhuman s
what drives the
thriller
plot,
these
terms
regularly and feverishly inverting. Are the white devils human or genetic
reconstructions
of pre-human
hominids? What
happens when
researchers
actively
seek to dethrone
human
priority,
cloning
extinctrivals?
One
protagonist
tracking
down
the white devil
atrocities
s
discovered to be less
human than
thought,
and the
terrain of
the
Democratic
Republic of
Congo is full
of
monstrosities.
Yet the
monstersat the
core of
the tale prove
more
humanthan
some
of their
pursuers.
In
this, there is
another
revision of the
sensibility that
sustained Conrad or
Wells: in
a world
of
hybrids, there can
be no
monsters.
Although
Istvan
Csicsery-Ronayhas
argued or a
postmodem
grotesque, where
anomalous deviations ... are norms (72), it may be that the horror of
transgression hat
has
powered
the Gothic and
the
Grotesquewould
have to be
wholly
reconceived once the
modem
obsession with
sorting,
categorizing, and
purifying
has been
displaced.
Another set of
texts that
virtually
enact Latour's
nsistence
on networksand
tangled
objects
is Kim
Stanley
Robinson's
ongoing
series aboutthe
science and
politics
of
global
warming, which so far
includesForty
Signs of
Rain(2004) and
Fifty Degrees
Below
(2005). Latour
has used
global warming
as an
instance
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BRUNOLATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION
15
where
matters f concern
supersede
matters f fact. Robinson'sbooks
stage
the
disputes
over evidence of climate
change
and
the
attempts
of scientific
researchers, political advisors,
laboratory
workers, funding
bureaucrats,
senators,
mathematic
modelers,displaced
Tibetans,
raumatized
ociobiologists,
and others
to persuade
a
Republicangovernment
o
acknowledge
he crisis
in the
midst of extreme
weather
events. What
heterogeneous
alliance
can
be
forged
against
the
hegemonic
bloc
of
rapacious
capital?
The
strategy
of
forming
alliances and networks that cut across diverse and
heterogeneous
sites is
explicitly worked out
in
the
novels;
the
pleasingly
odd
central character
begins
as a reductive
sociobiologist,
but
develops
an
understanding
f
the
politics
of
science that values the need for
impure
connections, making diverse and
surprising inks. With work likethis from so-called hard f (onemightfurther
include
Gregory Benford
or
Greg Bear as
writers modeling
the associative
networks of science),
the modern
dispensation that sustained
the
distinction
between hard and
soft within the
genre may be
largelysuperseded,as the
social
and the
scientific find
themselves
continually imbricated.
Thinkingabout
their
work
throughLatourwould demand
his supersessionas a
redundant
dispensa-
tion
of the modern
constitution.
It
may
be, then, that
Latour'swork is useful
not only as yet
anothercritical
resource to
overlay onto fiction but
also as a
useful guide to articulating
he
hybridityof recent sf. It links sf into a networkof associationsthatregisters a
transformationof
scientific
authority
n
the
contemporaryworld, helping
to
explain
why
sf
has
become such a
vital node in
the
collective for thinking
through
our
contemporarymattersof
anxious
concern.
NOTES
1. For
law,
see La
Fabrique;
for
religion,
see
Jubiler; for
art, see
Latourand
Peter,
Iconoclash;
for
recent
commentary on
critique, see
Why
Has
Critique Run Out
of
Steam?
2.
Latour
trained
first
as an
anthropologist,
doing
fieldwork in
the
Ivory
Coast. He
has spokenabout the influence of Marc Auge on the attempt o create a symmetrical
anthropology -that
is, one that
does not
presume
superiority
of
West
over East
or
observer
over
observed, and
that can
employ
anthropological
method
reversibly
(see
Latour,
Un
Monde
Pluriel).
3. Work
from
the
Edinburgh
School
(now
long
dispersed)
includes
that of
Steven
Shapin
and
Simon
Schaffer.
Latour
has
translated a
number
of works
of
English
sociology and
history
of
science into
French, but
has
ongoing
methodological
disputes
with
a
number of
English
counterparts,most
recently
with
David
Bloor: see
Bloor's
Anti-Latour
and
Latour's
reply, For
David Bloor. A
helpful
starting
point is
Schaffer's lengthyreview of Latour'sPasteurisationof France.
4. John
Law
also
runs
he Actor
Network
Resource
website; see <
http://www.lancs.
ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm
.
5. In
fact,
this
borrows
heavily
from
Michel
Serres's
arguments
for a
multi-
temporality
hat
confounds
conventional
historiography:
An
object,
a
circumstance, s
polychronic,
multitemporal,
and reveals
a time
that is
gathered
together,
with
multiple
pleats
(Serres
and
Latour
60).
For
Serres,
this
is part
of
a
simultaneity of
widely
distributed
historical
resources
that
entirely refuse
any
of the
kinds of
ruptural
narrative
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16
SCIENCEFICTION
STUDIES, VOLUME 33
(2006)
usually
associated with
postmodernism.
For more
conceptual
inks between
Serres
and
Latour,
see
Laura
Salisbury's
essay
in
this issue.
WORKS CITED
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Anti-Latour.
Studies
in
the
History
and
Philosophy of
Science
30.1
(1999): 81-112.
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Bruno
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Unscrewing
he
Big
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Actors
Macro-
Structure
Reality
and
How
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Help
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to
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277-303.
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26.
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Jubiler ou les
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Un
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L'Aube, 2005.
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15-25.
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The
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and
Communication
Technology. Ed.
Christanthi
Avgerou,
Claudio
Ciborra, and Frank
Land. Oxford:
Oxford UP,
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62-76.
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Pandora's
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MA:
Harvard
UP, 1999.
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The
Pasteurization
of France. 1984.
Trans.
Alan Sheridan
and John
Law.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Catherine
Porter.
Cambridge, Mass.:
HarvardUP,
2004.
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Reassembling
the
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UP,
2005.
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Action:
How
to
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and
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Mass.: Harvard
UP, 1987.
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War
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What
about
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Charlotte
Bigg. Chicago:
Prickly
Paradigm, 2002.
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION
17
. We Have Never Been
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1991. Trans.
CatherinePorter.
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1993.
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225-48.
and Peter Weibel.
Iconoclash:
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and Steve Woolgar.
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ABSTRACT
This essay
introduces he
work
of
controversial
historianand
philosopherof science
and
technology, BrunoLatour.It suggeststhat his theories of hybridobjects, his analyses of
networks
thatcriss-cross
normally
discrete
categories of
science,
politics,
and
culture,
and his
displacement of
the
modern/postmodern
paradigm can
offer
productive
new
readingsof
science
fiction,
permitting
ritics to
rethink he
genre's
relation o
science
and
society.
Latour's own
scientifictions his
coinage)
are
examined
alongsideworks
by
sf
authorsChina
Mieville, Paul
McAuley, and Kim
Stanley
Robinson.