He had intended the title as an honorific, but it also summed up the suspicion, perhaps most vividly expressed by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt in their 1994 polemic against postmodernism, Higher Superstition, that Latour was little more than “a Panurgian imp, come to catch all those solemn scientists with their pants down.” The titles of papers like “A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity” or “Do Scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid,” the latter of which was translated by Lydia Davis, did little to help his case.
In a typically reflexive turn, Latour began to examine how this hostile misunderstanding between “the two cultures” had come about. In 2004, he published “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” which posed the question of whether his early work on “the social construction of facts” had unwittingly laid the groundwork for dangerous anti-scientific thinking—in particular, climate change denial. “We want to add reality to scientific objects, but, inevitably, through a sort of tragic bias, we seem always to be subtracting some bit from it,” he wrote. “Like a clumsy waiter setting plates on a slanted table, every nice dish slides down and crashes on the ground.” Latour emerges in the essay as the kind of regretful character to whom Kazuo Ishiguro might be drawn—a man who, late in life, comes to realize that he has unwittingly served the enemy, and, with a somewhat exaggerated show of remorse, attempts to control the perception of his legacy. Propulsive, light-footed, and often very funny, it is the essay for which he seems to be most well-known on American college campuses, perhaps because of the seductive, if misleading, portrait it presents of the influence of French theory.
Later, Latour argued—correctly, I believe—that climate deniers had seized the tools not of postmodern critics but of the most naïve positivists (i.e., the facts are not yet certain enough) to launch their attack on scientific reality. In the final phase of his career, as global temperatures soared, he devoted himself to the climate crisis.5 With his knack for ferrying knowledge between networks, he published polemics, curated art exhibits, acted in plays, surveyed French villagers, and co-authored papers in scientific journals. Some of Latour’s critics dismissed these activities as a kind of penance, an effort to rebuild faith in the knowledge he once appeared to regard with skepticism. Latour maintained that it was not him who had evolved but the world. As he wrote in Facing Gaia, published in 2017:
Although certain scientist friends believe that I have stopped being a “relativist” and have started “believing” in the “facts” about the climate, it is on the contrary because I have never thought that “facts” were objects of belief, and because, ever since Laboratory Life, I have described the institution that makes it possible to ensure their validity in place of the epistemology that claimed to defend them, that I feel better armed today to help researchers protect themselves from the attacks of negationists. It is not I who have changed, but those who, finding themselves suddenly attacked, have understood to what extent their epistemology was protecting them badly."
