Bruno Latour in Pieces

An Intellectual Biography

Henning Schmidgen, Gloria Custance

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823263707, 9780823263691
• eBook ISBN: 9780823263714
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had "never been modern." In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent—and also popular—exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities.This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of "modes of existence." In the course of this enquiry it becomes clear that the basic problem to which Latour's work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture.

ONE

Exegesis and Ethnology

Beaune is one of France’s most famous and important wine centers. The small city in Burgundy is also the birthplace of two important scientists: in 1746 the mathematician Gaspard Monge, and in 1830 the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. Unsurprisingly for this region of the world, wine is one of the connecting links between Monge and Marey. Both scientists came from families of winegrowers and wine merchants—the two families had actually joined forces for a time in the late eighteenth century. And even the scientific work of these two sons of Beaune was associated: although their subjects could not have been more different, Monge and Marey shared a fascination with lines.

In the early nineteenth century, Monge became one of the founding fathers of descriptive geometry. Already at school he had made a large-scale plan of his home town using drawing instruments he constructed himself. In the 1860s Marey made a name for himself as a laboratory scientist specializing in physiology and as a proponent of all instruments and techniques for graphically recording vital functions in the widest sense—from actions of the heart and lungs to speech and the flow of water. In many books and articles Marey praised the virtues of the graphic method, which he said enabled him to get the phenomena of life to speak “in their own language”—or, even better: to draw—in the laboratory.1

Latour was also born in Beaune into a family of wine growers, and he also has “a passion for the trace.” In his sociological studies of science, for example, he frequently talks about the inscription devices that are used in modern laboratories to record and collect data and visualize it in clearly arranged curves. In a countermove, as it were, in his sociological studies of technology he develops a special graphic method in which “sociotechnical graphs” are used to map how human beings interact with technical beings. And when Latour investigates the visibility of Paris as an ethnographer, he takes along a (chrono)photographer, who translates the different sequences of their exploration into curved series of images (PV 21–22).2

It is tempting to see Monge, Marey, and Latour’s partiality for lines, curves, and graphs as connected to their native Burgundian landscape of wine-growing countryside. For isn’t it possible to see the training of vines, by attaching them to stakes, trellises, or pergolas, as an interesting conjunction of lines? On the one side the flexible lines of the climbing and winding plants and on the other the rigid lines of the vine training system? Peter Sloterdijk, in a tribute speech honoring Latour, went so far as to speak of the “primary Burgundism” of Latourian thought. According to Sloterdijk, the dense fabric of grapevines, terroirs, rhizobacteria, fermentation processes, the vintner’s art, glass industry, and haulage firms, which is so typical for the Beaune context, represent the basic model for Latour’s recurrent theme that natures, humans, things, and technologies belong together.3

It is indeed possible to understand wine as an exemplary object of Latour’s empirical philosophy, a “quasi-object” that is situated equally between nature and culture, as well as between religion and science, on the one side, and matter and signs on the other. For wine is first and foremost an organic substance that has been made for thousands of years and has developed into a fine art and a science (including through pasteurization, which Maison Louis Latour used early on for its red wines).4 Wine is also a cultural symbol that in all ages past as well as today possesses a fascinating aura and an enormous power of attraction. And, after all, it is the enjoyment of tasting wine—“Let us suppose that a cellar in Burgundy invites you to a wine tasting …” (PN 84)—that Latour judges to be a fitting example of how the interplay of sensations and inscriptions, of organs and instruments leads to an enhancement of the ability to discover in an ostensibly well-known reality an ever greater number of experienceable differences and variants.

Studies in Dijon

In the mid-1960s Latour started to detach himself from his home town. In nearby Dijon he began to study philosophy in 1966. Dijon is also not just any town. In the 1910s, Lucien Febvre taught at the local university. As is well known, Febvre included disciplines such as linguistics and ethnology in his historical studies as important resources and in this way contributed decisively to establishing the Annales school of historical thinking. The same disciplines, in particular linguistics and ethnology, would be of particular interest to Latour in his writings on the sociology and history of the sciences. Furthermore, at the University of Dijon one of the founders of historical epistemology, the most influential form of Francophone history and philosophy of science, worked for ten years: Gaston Bachelard. From 1930 to 1940 Bachelard taught and researched in Dijon, which is where several of his best-known works were written, including The New Scientific Spirit and The Psychoanalysis of Fire as well as L’intuition de l’instant, a hitherto untranslated tribute to Bachelard’s friend and university colleague, the regional historian and writer Gaston Roupnel.5

Latour has no time for Roupnel’s ecomysticism, and even to Bachelard he refers only for a limited period of time. In the late 1970s Latour uses Bachelard’s concept of “phenomenotechnique” when it is a matter of describing the construction of research objects in the scientific practice of laboratories. Later, Latour will increasingly distance himself from the “French style” of the history of science, which, following Bachelard, was developed in Paris under the aegis of Georges Canguilhem in particular. In this period, the mere mention of the words “epistemology” or “epistemological break” suffices to provoke reactions of dissociation in Latour.6

Conditions in Dijon were accommodating to the distancing of oneself. Whereas in the French capital enthusiasm was growing for both the student movement and historical epistemology—especially in Pierre Macherey, Dominique Lecourt, and other students of Canguilhem and Louis Althusser—in Dijon the philosopher Jean Brun was the dominant figure. Brun was a reputed expert on the ancient Greek philosophers and a gifted educator who, following Kierkegaard, developed an existentialist view of the human subject, inwardly divided but seeking balance. Despite that the early Canguilhem was one of his teachers when he was at school, Brun’s interest in the problem of technology was not motivated by epistemology but rather by the history of philosophy. Thus it does not appear that this interest of Brun’s led him to offer any courses in the philosophy of science or indeed in the sociology of science.7

Another young philosopher, who was teaching in Dijon at this time and who had considerable influence on Latour, maintained an even greater distance to Bachelard: André Malet. After completing his Ph.D. in Catholic theology, in 1957 Malet converted to Protestantism and began a second dissertation, this time in philosophy. Titled Mythos et logos, it was an in-depth analysis of the work of the German Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Malet’s supervisor for the dissertation was the philosopher Paul Ricœur. This may be one of the reasons why the initial question posed in Malet’s thesis, published in 1962, does not sound much like theology: “What is objectivity?” The orientation becomes more comprehensible in light of the central theme of the dissertation, which is Bultmann’s project of “demythologization” (Entmythologisierung), that is, examination of the biblical texts with regard to their authentic content, their existential core. Malet’s thesis concludes with a discussion of the relationship of Bultmann’s theology to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger titled “Theology and Ontology.”8

In the supplementary dissertation, which at that time was required, Malet also engaged with the beginnings of modern biblical exegesis, particularly Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. When the supplementary dissertation was published in 1966, Malet had already moved from Paris to Dijon. There he became Brun’s assistant, and one of his first projects was to undertake the translation of Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition into French—a work that Latour still cited in the 1980s in the preliminary studies for his “anthropology of science” (CR 232).9

The young student was seriously impressed by this former Catholic priest who had a consuming interest in Bultmann and Heidegger. As Latour recalls, he “spent” four whole years with Malet, and during this time he studied Bultmann’s work “intensively.”10 One encounters the traces of these studies in his oeuvre time and again. In 1975 Latour completed his studies with a Ph.D. thesis, the title of which—Exegèse et ontologie à propos de la resurrection (Exegesis and ontology, with reference to the resurrection)—can be read as a reference to Bultmann. Four years later, in Laboratory Life, he cites the “form criticism” co-developed by Bultmann, when it is a question of the “existential interpretation” of scientific reports and accounts (LL1 169), and in 1984, in the first pages of his book about Pasteur, he invokes the sections of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that deal with the reading of the Scriptures to make a case for a new kind of “exegesis” of scientific texts (PF 7). During an interview in the mid-1990s Latour even made a point of stressing that “I was trained in philosophy and biblical exegesis,” and as he has recently stated more precisely, it was without doubt his study of Bultmann that directed his attention to the reading and writing aspects of scientific practices.11

However, the road from Bultmann’s theology to the sociology of science and technology is not a direct one, and Malet’s notions of “incarnation in actu” and “tradition (in an active sense),” as heavily as they are inspired by contrasting the ancient Greek world of science to the biblical world of religion,12 cannot be readily transformed into a notion of Science in Action.

Péguy’s Inscriptions

Initially, Latour even took up the question of exegesis in a completely different way. This is demonstrated by his very first publication, a lecture held in 1973 but not published until 1977, which was on the theme of repetition in the work of the writer Charles Péguy.

Born in 1873 and killed in action in 1914, Péguy was one of the most important philosophers and poets of French modernism. He wrote plays, dialogues, religious epic poems, essays, and polemics, including against Émile Durkheim’s sociology, which at that time was in the process of establishing itself as a formal academic discipline. Péguy also founded, edited, and published the journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine, in which, between 1900 and 1914, appeared contributions by authors such as Henri Bergson, Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, and Romain Rolland as well as his own essays. In his text Latour focuses on one of Péguy’s most famous works, Clio: Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne [Clio: Dialogue between history and the pagan soul]. He engages with both versions of this dialogue published posthumously, Clio I and Clio II, and in the context of a “structural reading” compares them to the synoptic gospels of the New Testament.

It is worthwhile to take a closer look at Latour’s unconventional reading of Péguy’s works, because the text already lays out his central theme: namely, the problem of the social tradition of experience and knowledge. Further, this early publication exhibits typical stylistic features that we will also encounter in later works, such as the explicit reflections on a role that is merely played by the author and the utilization of graphic schemata to illustrate what has been written or said. In addition, the essay on Péguy—via the Malet-Bultmann context, so to speak—conveys the encounter between Latour and Deleuze, which we shall look at more closely in the following chapters.

As a first step Clio can be seen as the result of transposing Bergson’s philosophy of time onto the problem of history during Péguy’s gradual turning to Catholicism. Similar to the way in which Bergson contrasts time and duration, intellect and intuition, Péguy differentiates between history and tradition, science and experience. To illustrate this difference, for example, in Clio history is compared to a long railway line that runs along the coast and that allows one to stop at any station one wishes. In this metaphor tradition—collective memory—appears as the coast, with its marshes, people, fishes, estuaries of rivers and streams, as life on land and life in the sea.13

Clio develops this two-part metaphor within the context of a critique of the modern era and the great importance it attaches to the systematic study of history. That research methods and instruments are deemed to have primary importance in the way the discipline of history operates, Péguy considers one of the greatest errors of modern times. As he writes elsewhere: “As though ignorance of the present were a sine qua non for access to knowledge of the past.”14 The countermodel of history that Péguy proposes against the systematic endeavor of the Sorbonnards is oriented on secondary-school teachers in rural areas, who act upon the basis of their “tacit experience” as (family) people and (world) citizens, that is, as committed witnesses of history who, caught in a precarious social situation, try to attain orientation about and within history.

Against the methods of professional historians, which are inspired by a belief in progress and therefor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introduction
• 1. Exegesis and Ethnology
• 2. A Philosopher in the Laboratory
• 3. Machines of Tradition
• 4. Pandora and the History of Modernity
• 5. Of Actants, Forces, and Things
• 6. Science and Action
• 7. Questions Concerning Technology
• 8. The Coming Parliament
• Conclusion
• Timeline
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page