Where do we touch down?
Jeremy Harding LRB Vol. 44 No. 24 · 15 December 2022
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo
by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose. Polity, 80 pp., £9.99,
After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis
by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose. Polity, 180 pp., £14.99, September 2021
Bruno Latour died in October, aged 75, without a proper species classification. L’Obs described him as a sociologist; Le Monde praised his distinguished career in sociology, anthropology and philosophy. To some, political theory was another of his accomplishments, though he wasn’t so sure…
Latour... can be perfectly clear as he leads you through a complicated exposition, yet opaque when the argument seems plain sailing... His last works are elusive and magnificent by turns, as he tries to get his bearings in the fog of climate change...
‘What processes operate,’ Latour wondered, ‘to remove the social and historical circumstances on which the construction of a fact depends?’
None of this was ‘history of science’, or even ‘philosophy of science’, which was mostly a matter of indifference to the postwar generation of French thinkers. Foucault was preoccupied by the ‘human sciences’, but less as a philosopher than as a historian of systems of thought who came at them with a radical libertarian parti pris.
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| This Actor Network Theory exercise involves the interaction of a ball, two species of experimenters and the Sciences Po polo field. |
Latour ...was already involved in Actor Network Theory (ANT), an open-ended way of thinking that redistributes agency to all the players in the drama of the sciences. As well as the people conducting the study, this includes the disciplines involved (e.g. sociology, biology, ethnology) and the more or less complex technologies to hand (from scribbled field notes to intricate laboratory equipment).
All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings... For laypeople in an age of species extinction this feels like a crucial shift, yet it’s more often systems and technologies that ANT likes to explore, and it’s difficult to form an accurate picture of the networks if you’re not on the team. I think vaguely of Hegel’s dialectic being the wrong way up and Marx announcing that he had stood it on its feet. But in the ANT model there are so many feet for a dialectic to stand on that it could easily trip over itself. Or run amok. I think next of the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where ‘things’, animated by the science of magic, rapidly get out of control.Bipeds can get off on the wrong foot if they take Latour too literally. In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), it turns out that we were indeed modern, by dint of aspiration, but that modernity had many unforeseen consequences. Then, too, the riot of agency that ANT whisks into life may only be a way of telling us that the hard sciences and their objects must come to a rapprochement with the humanities and their objects – politics, art, philosophy – in a ‘non-modern’ or ‘a-modern’ truce that makes no firm distinction between the two regimes...odernity cut the epistemological knot, establishing a crude division between the knowledge of things and the study of human activities (politics, for instance). Postmodernism had no issue with the split. The next step – après-postmodern – was to pick up the severed parts and weave them back into a complex ensemble.
