Arkady Plotnitsky

Theory and Cultural Studies Program
Department of English
Purdue University
aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu

 

Review of: Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

 

Scientists are becoming more attentive to and are addressing more openly the relationships between politics and science. (Many scientists have of course–at least since Galileo, if not Archimedes or even the pre-Socratics–been aware of and had to confront the complexity of these relationships.) As I am writing this review, I am reading a commentary by Roger A. Pielke Jr., “Science Policy: Policy, Politics, and Perspective,” in the current issue of Nature (28 March 2002), dealing with these relationships in their, I would argue, postmodern specificity, as does Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope. The timing of the Nature article could not be more auspicious for this review, but other examples, articles, and books, technical and popular, are not hard to come by.

 

It is difficult to say to what degree this increased attention is specifically due to the influence of what is known as science studies or social, or sometimes social-constructivist, studies of science, a controversial field that has emerged during the last several decades and to which Latour’s work largely belongs. It is also not altogether clear how much this attention was influenced by the controversies themselves around science studies, most recently the so-called “Science Wars.” The latter followed the appearance of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (1994), theoretical physicist Alan Sokal’s hoax article published in the journal Social Text (1995), and Impostures intellectueles (1998), co-authored by Sokal and another theoretical physicist, Jean Bricmont, first published in France, and then in England and the U.S., under the title Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1998). Latour has been a prominent subject of and participant in the Science Wars debates, beginning with Gross and Levitt’s book, and through Latour’s responses to his critics, including those in Pandora’s Hope (some among the essays included in the book have been published earlier). Some of these debates have been conducted in scientific journals, such as Nature and Physics Today, and have involved leading scientists. Accordingly, they may have had an impact (it is, again, difficult to say how large) on the proliferating discussions of the relationships between politics and science in the scientific community. It would be hard, however, to underestimate other factors involved, from increasing competition for funding to the problems of bioethics; these may indeed be the more significant ones.

 

Be that as it may, Latour’s work and arguments, as presented in the book, could help scientists and others who want to understand the complexity, “the Gordian knot,” as Latour called it in his earlier We Have Never Been Modern, of the postmodern entanglement of politics and science. Indeed, the three problem phenomena invoked by the Nature article just cited, under the fitting heading “Gridlock”–“global climate change,” “nuclear power,” and “biodiversity” (367)–are paradigmatically Latourian, and the first is specifically invoked by him in We Have Never Been Modern. That need not mean that scientists or others must agree with Latour’s analysis (the present author does not always either). But they might do well to engage with it properly, or at least to stay with it for more than a sentence or two, the usual limit of most “science warriors,” which also applies to other postmodernists they “read.” I am not sure how much hope–this may be a kind of Pandora’s hope in turn–one might hold here, and sometimes the Pandora’s-box nature of these works, Latour’s included, complicates their chances. I am not sure that humanists, especially historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, will always give Latour the chance he deserves either. I hope they will.

 

Beyond serving as a useful introduction to the current stage of science studies and as a commentary on the Science Wars (and it is, again, worth reading for the sake of these subjects alone), Pandora’s Hope pursues, with many notable successes, at least three ambitious and interconnected tasks. The first is to redefine the concept of reality by using the research undertaken in science studies; the second is to rethink the relationships between science and politics in modern (ultimately extending from Plato) and then postmodern culture; and the third is to redefine political philosophy–indeed, Latour appears to suggest, even to define it meaningfully for the first time. These tasks are interconnected in part because the phenomena in question are, Latour rightly argues, themselves irreducibly interconnected. In particular, there can be no modernity or postmodernity other than scientific, as science was irreducibly involved with setting up what Latour calls, in We Have Never Been Modern, “the modern constitution,” which unequivocally separated nature and politics. Or rather, the moderns only claim (and can only claim) to separate them, since such a separation is, in principle, impossible, as both are ultimately entangled in any phenomena, scientific or political. Hence, Latour’s title, We Have Never Been Modern. Pandora’s Hope builds on and deepens this argument.

 

The book has some key “postmodern” allies, in particular Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze (in part via Isabelle Stengers’s work) and Jean-François Lyotard, who, while mentioned only in passing, may be more important for the book than it might appear. Indeed, I would argue that Latour’s work is much more postmodern, at least in Lyotard’s sense, than he is willing to acknowledge. Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” can be coordinated with Lyotard’s famous maxim that the postmodern precedes the modern, in a pre-logical rather than ontological sense. This sense is defined by a complex underlying (“postmodern”) dynamics that both gives rise to and is suppressed or repressed by the modern, not unlike the way in which the hybrid or the “factish” (combining “fact” and “fetish”) are repressed by the moderns’ unequivocal separations (into nature and politics, into facts and fetishes) in Latour. This kind of postmodernism, that is, the one that is both Lyotardian and Latourian (keeping in mind the differences between Lyotard’s and Latour’s views), helps the richness and effectiveness of Latour’s analysis, rather than misses its arguments, as some postmodernisms, or at least some postmodernists, indeed might. Reciprocally, Latour’s analysis enriches and expands our understanding of postmodern culture and the role of science and technology in it.

 

The book has nine hefty chapters (and a substantial conclusion). The first, “Do You Believe in Reality?: News from the Trenches of the Science War,” serves as an introduction and a set-up, but it is significant in its own right in giving its title question a necessary complexity and a necessary ambiguity, or in Niels Bohr’s phrase “essential ambiguity,” without which one cannot perhaps refer to any form of ultimate reality. The next four chapters are case studies, vintage Latour and engrossing reading, but with significant philosophical twists. Two of them, Chapters 4 and 5, extend Latour’s justly famous work on Louis Pasteur. Latour’s work is arguably the best that science studies has to offer us, in part given its greater philosopher charge, which contrasts with most other works in this generally more empiricist field. The case studies also ground and prepare the last three, more philosophical, chapters, on which I shall primarily concentrate here. These chapters define the book’s achievement as a contribution to the current state of the debates concerning the relationships between science and culture, politics included. The Science Wars are, Latour argues, a reflection and an effect of this role.

 

Indeed, as he became arguably the main target of the Science Wars scientific critics, at least as far as science studies are concerned (Lacan, Deleuze, and, overt disclaimers to the contrary, Derrida, are targeted for their “postmodernist” abuses of science), Latour gets hold of some among the deeper underlying forces involved in shaping the confrontation. Reciprocally, however, these forces define the postmodern philosophical, cultural, and political scene. As I said, the grounds for both this insight into the Science Wars and the underlying play of forces in question are prepared in We Have Never Been Modern and, to some degree, already in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time by Serres and Latour. The workings of these forces are now traced to Plato’s Gorgias (not coincidentally, Lyotard discusses Gorgias, the philosopher, in The Differend as well), in Chapter 7, “The Inventions of the Science War: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles” and in Chapter 8, “A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitics.”

 

Stephen Weinberg’s comment in his “Sokal’s Hoax,” parallel to Socrates’s (broader) view of the role of geometry in the world (human and divine) in Gorgias, provides a fitting point of departure: “Our civilization has been powerfully affected by the discovery that nature is strictly governed by impersonal laws….We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still best humanity” (216). Weinberg is not wrong in the first part of this statement, although one could, and Latour does, assess the value and significance of this impact differently. The impact itself may indeed be traced to the Greeks’ invention of mathematics rather than, as in Weinberg’s narrower context, to the invention of modern (mathematical) physics by Galileo and, especially, by Newton. It is Weinberg’s second statement, or rather the conjunction of both statements thus defined, that is Latour’s primary target. Alan Sokal’s “serious” “political,” including his “Marxist,” arguments, may be shown to follow the same “logic” (quotation marks appear obligatory here). To the degree, which is large, that this conjunction defines the Science Wars, one can indeed trace their invention to Plato’s Gorgias, defined by “the strong link…between the respect for impersonal natural laws, on the one hand, and the fight against irrationality, immorality, and political disorder, on the other” (217). More accurately, in Socrates’s case one would speak of the universal laws (of geometry), more those of mind than of nature, and Weinberg, in fairness, does not claim a role for mathematics beyond science, as his immediate context is more narrowly and differently defined. Essentially, however, Latour’s argument stands, given the deeper underpinning of Weinberg’s argument. Indeed Latour’s immediate elaboration nearly makes the case. He writes:

 

In both quotations the fate of Reason and the fate of Politics are associated in a single destiny. To attack Reason is to render morality and social peace impossible. Right is what protects us against Might; Reason against civil warfare. The common tenet is that we need something “inhuman”–for Weinberg, the natural law no human has constructed; for Socrates, geometry whose demonstrations escape human whim–if we want to be able to fight against “inhumanity.” To sum up: only inhumanity will quash inhumanity. Only a Science that is not made by man will protect a Body Politic that is in constant risk of being made by the mob. Yes, Reason is our rampart, our Great Wall of China, our Maginot Line against the dangerous unruly mob. (217)

 

What is perhaps most remarkable about this, one might say, naïve view, naïve as concerns both science or mathematics (for example, in applying to nature, including the nature of mind, a human, “all too human,” concept of law) and politics, or the relationships between them, is that it has been so successful. For, as Latour immediately observes, “this line of reasoning, which I will call ‘inhumanity against inhumanity,’ has been attacked ever since it began, from the Sophists, against whom Plato launches his all-out assault, all the way to the motley gang of people accused of ‘postmodernism’ (an accusation, by the way, as vague as the curse of being a ‘sophist’)” (217). Indeed the two accusations are often vaguely combined. There is no simple answer to the question why these counterarguments have more often failed than succeeded, and it would, accordingly, be difficult to blame Latour for not really pursuing the subject in the book. But he could have. This relative lack of success, admittedly, gives the other side of the Science Wars additional ammunition that is philosophically feeble but politically workable. Admittedly, too, many of these counterarguments have been equally deficient, philosophically and politically. Indeed, according to Latour, most (all?) of them have failed in at least one respect, something he aims to remedy: “None of these critiques…has disputed simultaneously the definition of Science and the definition of the Body Politic that it implies. Inhumanity is accepted in both or in at least one of them” (218).

 

This assessment does not appear to me entirely accurate, even with respect to what Latour sees as “postmodern” critique and specifically to Friedrich Nietzsche, who, perhaps inevitably, enters the scene immediately, first by way of quotation, “human all too human,” and then by name (217). Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morals, invoked throughout the chapter, is not sufficiently explored by Latour, either. Nietzsche’s and Latour’s views are of course not the same, but, especially on this particular point, they share more than Latour appears to think. The philosophical effectiveness of any given argument, however, does not necessarily guarantee and sometimes prevents its success anywhere, among people or philosophers, for example, as indeed both Socrates (including in Gorgias, as Latour observes) and, more deeply, Nietzsche understood so well. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche undertook an investigation, unprecedented in profundity and scope alike, of the question why Socrates’s or related and parallel arguments (those shaping the history of Christian morality, for example) have, eventually, succeeded on such an extraordinary scale, including where they initially failed, in Greece.

 

Similarly, Lyotard’s argument from The Postmodern Condition on goes quite far in understanding the “humanity,” indeed conjoined “humanity” rather than conjoined “inhumanity,” of both science and politics, that is, speaking for the moment in terms Latour uses. Ultimately, to return to the idiom of We Have Never Been Modern, we need a new “constitution,” one that, as against the (unworkable) “modern constitution,” enacts a conjunction rather than a strict separation of nature and politics, and even a certain “parliamentarity” of the human and the nonhuman. In Pandora’s Hope Latour approaches this economy, which is also a political economy, in other terms as well, such as those of the collective (of humans and nonhumans), specifically in Chapter 6, indebted in part to the work of Michel Callon (with whom Latour collaborated earlier), and also in “factish” (“fact-fetish”) in Chapter 9. This view is not far from Lyotard’s, even though Latour himself, again, juxtaposes it to postmodernism. Lyotard’s own concept of “the inhuman,” developed in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, could be considered from this viewpoint and used to complement and amplify Latour’s critique. On the other hand, Latour seems to give Lyotard credit, well deserved indeed, for his engagement with the political in his subsequent works, specifically along the lines of Latour’s argument here (232). These works, however, such as Just Gaming and The Differend, extend rather than depart from his argument in The Postmodern Condition. As I said, Latour is much more “postmodernist” than he suspects. Reciprocally, Latour’s argument throws a new light on postmodernism and the debates around it, or within it, for example, concerning the more Lyotardian view of postmodernist epistemology and politics versus more Marxist views, such as those of Fredric Jameson and his followers. In the latter case, a Socratic-like agenda of the governing role of a particular, almost geometrically demonstrable, political theory, often takes over.

 

It may be noted that even short of a deeper analysis of its human or human-nonhuman nature, one could argue that, at least, modern or “postmodern” (the term has been used even by some scientists) mathematics and science are not as cooperative in the agenda in question as, for example, Weinberg would believe them to be. Even if one accepts Weinberg’s position and views modern mathematics and science in his “inhuman” terms, they appear to tell us something quite different from what Weinberg seems to hear. Indeed more limited as it is, this type of counterargument has a force of its own. The grounds on which the science warriors, from Socrates on, build their edifice are, Latour is right, untenable; but their argument fails, their edifice collapses even on its own ground. Lyotard offers this type of argument as part of his critique of modernity’s ideology of science in The Postmodern Condition (a critique that has often been misunderstood, including by the science warriors). If, he argues, one wants to follow mathematics and science or what they tell us about nature and mind, in the way the Enlightenment follows classical mathematics and physics, one might want to examine first what twentieth-century mathematics and science–relativity, quantum physics, chaos theory, modern molecular biology and genetics, post-Gödelian mathematical logic, and so forth–actually tell us. More accurately, one should speak of a certain version or reading of the Enlightenment, to begin with, since both the Enlightenment and, for that matter, classical mathematics and science tell us a different story and a different history as well.

 

In any event, what mathematics and science in fact appear to tell us (about nature or themselves) is in conflict with the key premises of the modern (either in Lyotard’s or Latour’s sense) view or ideology of either mathematics and science or nature and politics. Among these premises are reality and causality (concomitantly defined by their mathematical, and specifically continuous, character); the independence of this mathematical, and indeed geometrical, reality of our engagement with nature through observation and measurement; a strictly logical view of mathematical reasoning (i.e., as always decidable as concerns the truth or falsity of any given proposition); and so forth. These premises and their necessity for the practice of mathematics and science have been questioned by some (it is true, not very many) mathematicians and scientists as well, in particular by Bohr, Heisenberg, and other founders of quantum physics, which puts these premises to their arguably most severe test on scientific grounds. The same premises also define the key programs of the Enlightenment and “the modern constitution,” based on the (“inhuman”) way in which mathematics and science, or nature and politics, allegedly work or, in the case of politics, ought to work. It follows, among other things, that contrary to Weinberg’s view or hope, nature may not in fact be subject to immutable, or any, mathematical laws. It goes almost without saying that to question such premises is not the same as simply abandoning them, but instead enables a better understanding of the limits of their applicability, a refinement of their conceptualization and formulations, and so forth. I say “almost” in view of persistent misunderstandings of this and related points, including those made by Latour himself, the misunderstandings that defined and in some ways (there are deeper philosophical and political factors, which is the point here) initiated the Science Wars debates.

 

Latour amplifies the preceding argument by his powerful and elegant analysis, one of the best in the book, in Chapter 8, “A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitics,” concerning the actual practice of science, which he sees, rightly, as in conflict with the Science Warriors’, the Socrates-Weinberg, view of science. This argument also allows one to

 

see…how the sciences can be free from the burden of making a type of politics that shortcuts politics. If we now calmly read the Gorgias, we recognize that a certain specialized form of reasoning, epistèmè, was kidnapped for a political purpose it could not possibly fulfill. This has resulted in bad politics but in an even worse science. If we let the kidnapped science escape, then two different meanings of the adjective “scientific” become distinguishable again after being lumped together for so long. (258)

 

 

The implications of this argument thus reach beyond our understanding of science, although not beyond science, which cannot be dissociated from modern politics–and there is perhaps no other politics, beginning with the Greeks and their invention of demonstration and democracy. As will be seen, for Latour, bringing science and politics, and demonstration and democracy, together so that both they and we could indeed benefit from each other is a task, a formidable “task of today” (265). First, however, we need to consider the two different meanings of “scientific” in question. As Latour writes:

 

The first meaning is that of Science with a capital S, the ideal of transportation of information without discussion or deformation. This Science, capital S, is not a description of what scientists do. To use an old term, it is an ideology that never had any other use, in the epistemologists’ hands, than to offer a substitute for public discussion. It has always been a political weapon to do away with the constraints of politics. From the beginning, as we saw in the dialogue, it was tailored to this end alone, and it has never stopped, through the ages, being used in this way. Because it was intended as a weapon, this conception of Science, the one Weinberg clings to so forcefully, is usable neither to “make humanity less irrational” nor to make the sciences better. It has only one use: “Keep your mouth shut!”–the “you” designating, interestingly enough, other scientists involved in controversies as much as the people in general. “Substitute Science, capital S, for political rationality” is only a war cry. In that sense, and that sense only, it is useful, as we can witness in these days of the Science Wars. However, this definition of Science No. 1, I am afraid, has no more uses than a Maginot Line, and I take great pleasure in being branded as “antiscientific” if scientific has only this meaning. (258-59)

 

The actual situation may be somewhat more complex, since Weinberg’s view of science (but not of politics) could be related to what scientists actually do, as Latour acknowledges in his discussion of the second meaning of “scientific,” but to which one might give further attention (259). In this sense, it is indeed the ideology in question that is the main problem here. Paul Feyerabend sees this move–this tremendous and impoverishing, “cold,” reduction of science and, through thus reduced science, of politics or even of life itself–as “the tale of abstraction against the richness of being,” his subtitle of Conquest of Abundance. He traces this move to the pre-Socratics, especially to Democritus’s atomism and Parmenides’s logic of oneness, and, ethically-politically, to Homer (on virtue), and then to the modern view of science, from Newton to Einstein and beyond. (Weinberg’s view would be an example as well.) Keats drives the point home more speedily and effectively in Lamia (with Socrates, and his philosophy, and both Descartes and Newton, and their optics, in mind, and perhaps with Democritus and Boyle as well, all figures crucial to Latour’s argument, here and elsewhere): “… Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy? … Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings/ Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,/ Empty the haunted air …” (Part II, ll. 229-30, 234-35).

 

At least, a certain philosophy and/as a certain form or ideology of mathematics and science, since the latter views pursued differently (or even also differently) could also create “the richness of being,” even by their rules and lines. “But,” Latour continues, “‘scientific’ has one other meaning, which is much more interesting and is not engaged in doing away with politics, not because it is apolitical or because it is politicized, but because it deals with entirely different questions, a difference that is never respected when Science No. 1 is taken, by its friends as well as by its foes, as all there is to say about science” (259). It is, thus, first of all, not a question of an argument or discourse against science, quite the contrary. Latour’s conception of science (or, and again comcomitantly, of reality or truth)–one of his most important and original in the book–also goes beyond earlier and more rigid forms of social constructivism, such as that of David Bloor and his school (197). This richer and subtler “constructivism” is arrived at in part by reciprocally rethinking the social as well, most especially through the concept of the collective of human and nonhumans, and of their entangled and mutually defining relationships, in Chapter 6. As Latour writes:

 

The second meaning of the adjective “scientific” is the gaining of access, through experiments and calculations, to entities that at first do not have the same characteristics as humans do. This definition may seem odd, but it is what is alluded to by Weinberg’s own interest in “impersonal laws.” Science No. 2 deals with nonhumans, which in the beginning are foreign to social life, and which are slowly socialized on our midst through the channels of laboratories, expeditions, institutions, and so on, as recent historians of science have so often described. What working scientists want to be sure of is that they do not make up, with their own repertoire of actions, the new entities to which they have access. They want each new nonhuman to enrich their repertoire of action, their ontology. Pasteur, for example, does not [arbitrarily] “construct” his microbes; rather his microbes, and French society, are changed, through their common agency, from a collective [of humans and nonhumans] made up of, say, x entities into one made up of many more entities, including microbes. (259)

 

This argument may need a more nuanced stratification as concerns the production and circulation in question, as Latour indeed intimates (259). In particular, one might need to consider multiple circulations of and circulations between circulations, within science and between science and culture. It is also clear that these profusions or circulations within circulations are bound to give rise to other meanings of “scientific” as well. Latour adds one himself (260, note 3), but still others, either more limited to science or mathematics or more extended, are conceivable and indeed necessary. Latour’s argument is, however, fundamentally right and momentous in its implications. First of all, it follows that there could be neither a concept of reality nor a meaningful relation to any reality outside such circulations. Accordingly, all “realities” of science studies (such as those defined by various collectives of humans and nonhumans, hybrids, factishes, and so forth) in turn emerge in relation to these circulations. This view also makes “it possible to say, without contradiction,” as Latour does in his analysis of Pasteur, “both ‘Airborne germs were made up in 1984’ and ‘They were there all along'” (173). The same logic applies to several of his similar arguments elsewhere, often equally misunderstood or unread, for example, by science warriors.

 

Indeed one of the most remarkable capacities of modern science, specifically quantum theory, is to “construct” (using this terms with Latour’s qualification in the above passage in mind) and place in circulation unconstructible entities (such as those known as “elementary particles”). That is, it is capable of constructing and placing in circulation something to which no conceivable notion or property, physical or mathematical, could be rigorously attributed. They are circulated as such both within and outside physics, albeit far from without much resistance to this type of epistemology, either within science (Einstein was one the primary forces of this resistance and inspiration for many others) or outside it. It is not surprising that the idea meets so much resistance since, as I have indicated, it puts on hold the claims, such as Weinberg’s, that “nature” could ultimately be described or governed by mathematics. This is, of course, not to say that one no longer uses mathematics, but only that one uses it differently, including for the purposes of circulating the work concerning such un-objects.

 

From a Latourian perspective, Weinberg’s or others’ “interests,” grounding (but not identical to) their view of science as Science No. 1, would be part of such circulations, possibly by grounding some among them. But this view must also be understood in relation to other circulations, possible or actual, or of course also to impossibilities of circulation. The same argument would apply to mathematics (so crucial for Weinberg’s or Socrates’s views of the world), to mathematical circulation, and to the circulation of mathematics itself (as a field). Mathematics may well be a special case, including (a special case of its own) specifically geometrical demonstration or proof, and we must account for this specificity, in turn, in a special way. But it is not outside of this picture. Mathematics is not likely to be some special gift from the “heavens” (divine or human), although some mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers may think it is. Instead, like science or philosophy, it may be seen as having arisen and continuing to arise from translating and refining more common experiences and practices, and from circulations they entail or that give rise to them.

 

As Latour elegantly argues in Chapter 3, “Circulating Reference,” the work of science studies, such as Latour’s own, participates differently from but reciprocally with science itself in these circulations and circulations of circulation (78-79). This circulation is contiguous or metonymic. A remarkable case of a circulation, indeed a circulation between, at least, two circulations, where reciprocity and metonymy are accompanied by metaphoric parallels, is that of Frederic Joliot, considered in Chapter 3, “Science’s Blood Flow: Joliot’s Scientific Intelligence.” Latour’s title is aptly fitting on both counts, in its circulation metaphor and its blood metaphor. Circulation is the life-blood of science, which also needs what exceeds it. (Latour also puns on “intelligence.”) I ought to add, however, that this argument is only a part, a small part, of this superb chapter, which offers a brilliant and complex analysis of a complex case, defined as much by Joliot’s political as by his scientific activities, and by the complex circulations between science and politics. This economy, Latour shows, defines Joliot’s work well before he becomes (after the Second World War) a prominent presence on the political scene in France and beyond.

 

Now, the analysis of such circulations and circulations between circulations is not easy, either in their historical specificity or (to the degree we can separate them) in terms of the necessary concepts, and Latour’s analysis by and large succeeds on both counts. But he seems to me stronger on the work and abundance of circulations than on “breaks” in circulations or the impossibility of circulation or “construction,” in mathematics and science or elsewhere, which seems to me just as important, in some cases, more important. In general, Latour’s thought is closer to what may be seen as the (more utopian?) philosophy of abundance and continuity, which also defines the thought of Feyerabend and Deleuze, or Whitehead and Bergson, or earlier Leibniz and Spinoza (the last three in turn major inspirations for Deleuze). This philosophy may be contrasted to the philosophy of insufficiency and rupture, extending from Kant’s critical philosophy to Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Derrida, and de Man, among others. Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche may be seen as the thinkers of both, and it is to be observed that in all these cases it is also a question of relative balance, rather than unequivocal determination. Allegiances to the first and, conversely, distances from the second line of thought are quite apparent in Latour’s views–sometimes, I would argue, at a price, and especially, again, as concerns a more rigorous understanding of heterogeneities and breaks in the circulations in question. On that score, Latour’s analysis could benefit from the ideas of the figures just mentioned, especially Bataille, Derrida, de Man, or, again, Lyotard (specifically on “the inhuman”). Lyotard defines the political as the irreducible heterogeneous, even if interactive–interactively heterogeneous and heterogeneously interactive–and subject to equally irreducible breaks in its circulations. Latour, however, is quite right to insist on the significance of circulation, especially insofar as the relationships between science and politics, or culture, are concerned. His analysis of such circulations, their rhizomatic networks, and circulations between circulations, networks linking networks, is a major contribution, whose significance extends well beyond science studies.

 

Latour is also right in arguing that “to do justice to this scientific work,” the work defined as Science No. 2, (the ideology of) Science No. 1 is “totally inadequate” (260). He adds a significant observation:

 

We recognize here, by the way, the two enemy camps between which science studies is trying to gain a foothold: those from the humanities who think we give too much to nonhumans; and those from some quarters of the “hard” sciences who accuse us of giving too much to the humans. This symmetrical accusation triangulates with great precision the place where we in science studies stand: we follow scientists in their daily scientific practice in the No. 2 definition, not in the No. 1 political definition. Reason–meaning Science No. 1–does not describe science better than cynicism describes politics. (260)

 

This statement, again, makes clear a crucial point. It is not a matter of a discourse against science, any more than against reality or truth, but rather that of refiguring and re-delimiting both and their relationships, in their relationships, naturally, as against, the ideology, ultimately itself non-scientific, although political, of Science No. 1. This is a brilliant reversal with respect to the attacks (such as those by the science warriors) against science studies. It is the science warriors’ view of science that is in fact political and not scientific; the science studies political view of science will be shown to be more scientific.

 

Nor is this all, as we now begin to perceive Latour’s ultimate, and quite elegant, logic more clearly. First of all, it is worth reiterating yet another more obvious and more easily apparent reversal. The “politics” of science warriors, let’s call it Politics or, with Latour, the Social No. 1, is not really political or social, any more than their science, Science No. 1, is scientific. Science No. 2 is more political as well, along with being scientific. It is, however, by combining both reversals that Latour’s logic reaches its ultimate conclusions. The form, the formal logic, as it were, of Socrates’s argument is in fact repeated. Science is indeed crucial to and defines politics, which might, finally (might!) enable us “to benefit from the Greeks’ two inventions, demonstration and democracy” (265). But how different is the substance of both politics and science, and of their relationships, and, hence, how different is the political philosophy one now needs to pursue! For, thanks in large measure to what Science No. 2 could do for politics, this new constitution entails a very different social, or in Serres’s terms, natural or social-natural contract and a new collectivity and, in the language of We Have Never Been Modern, a new “parliamentarity” of both humans and nonhumans. Latour writes:

 

Far from taking us away from the agora, Science No. 2–one clearly separated from the impossible agenda of Science, capital S–redefines political order as that which brings together stars, prions, cows, heavens, and people, the task being to turn this collective into a “cosmos” instead of “unruly shambles” [as invoked by Socrates]. For scientists such an endeavor seems much more lively, much more interesting, much more adapted to their skills and genius, than the boring repetitive chore of beating the poor undisciplined demos with the big stick of “impersonal laws.” This new settlement is not the one Socrates and Callicles agreed on [in Gorgias ]–“appealing to one form of inhumanity to avoid inhuman social behavior”–but something that could be defined as “collectively making sure that the collective formed by ever vaster numbers of humans and nonhumans becomes a cosmos.” (261)

 

Naturally, this new politics is not easy to put into practice. (But then it took Socratic politics, defined by Science No. 1, a while to take a hold, indeed a grip, upon the world.) For, as Latour says,

 

For this other possible task, however, we not only need scientists who will abandon the older privileges of Science No. 1 and at last take up a science (No. 2) freed from politics [Politics No. 1, defined by Science No. 1], we also need a symmetrical transformation of politics. I confess that this is much more difficult, because, in practice, very few scientists are happy in the artificial straitjacket that Socrates’s position imposes on them, and they would be very happy to deal with what they are good at, Science No. 2. But what about politics? To convince Socrates is one things, but what about Callicles? To free science from politics [Politics No. 1] is easy, but how can we free politics from science [No. 1]? (261)

 

Latour may be too optimistic about scientists. He is right, however, to see politics as a more difficult problem here. Latour makes few suggestions in this direction, in this and in the following chapter. In the end, however, we, Latour and myself included, end with a question:

 

How can we mix Science No. 2, which brings an ever greater number of nonhumans into the agora, with Social No. 2, which deals with the very specific conditions of felicity that cannot be content with transporting forces or truth without deformation? I don’t know, but I am sure of one thing: no shortcuts are possible, no short-circuits, and no acceleration. Half of our knowledge may be in the hands of scientists, but the other, missing half is alive only in those most despised of all people, the politicians, who are risking their lives and ours in scientifico-political controversies that nowadays make up most of our daily bread. To deal with these controversies, a “double circulation” has to flow effortlessly again in the Body Politics: the one of science (No. 2) free from politics, and the other of politics freed from science (No. 1). The task of today may be summed up in the following odd sentence: Can we learn to like scientists as much as politicians so that at last we can benefit from the Greeks’ two inventions, demonstration and democracy? (265)

 

Latour, it is true, does not end here, observing that, while he “seem[s] to have accomplished [his] task, to have dismantled the old settlement that held sway over us,” “it is still as if [he has] achieved nothing” (266). Accordingly, he proceeds to his final chapter, Chapter 9, “The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes,” more constructive and more constructivist, but, again, beyond (merely) “social constructivism,” which he contends (I think, rightly) he never really subscribed to (197). We, as the book’s readers, can indeed be only slightly surprised here, since Latour’s analysis is well prepared and anticipated, and partly accomplished in an earlier chapter, but is now given a more rigorous conceptual architecture.

 

And yet the questions return and even bring a war with them, “a world war, even–at least a metaphysical one,” but also the Science Wars, now as “a respectable intellectual issue, not a pathetic dispute over funding fueled by campus journalists.” It is a war between the two views of reality and two settlements in opposition, the modernist one (with the reality of the world out there and Science No. 1 and Politics No. 1) and the settlement defined by the view of reality, science, and politics that is defined by Science No. 2. In this war, however, one might be sure, or “pretty sure,”

 

we will be without weapons, dressed in civilian clothes, since the task of inventing the collective [of humans and nonhumans] is so formidable that it renders all wars puny by comparison–including, of course, the Science Wars. In this [twentieth] century, which fortunately is coming to a close, we seem to have exhausted the evils that emerged from the open box of the clumsy Pandora. Though it was here unrestrained curiosity that made the artificial maiden open the box, there is no reason to stop being curious about what was left inside. To retrieve the Hope that is lodged there, at the bottom, we need a new and rather convoluted contrivance. I have had a go at it. Maybe we will succeed with the next attempt. (300)

 

Maybe we will. Latour thus ends (this is his last sentence) with an implicit question mark, for the new century perhaps. He begins the book with a warning to the reader. “This,” he says,

 

is not a book about new facts, nor is it exactly a book of philosophy. In it, using only very rudimentary tools, I simply try to present, in the space left empty by the dichotomy between subject and object, a conceptual scenography for the pair human and nonhuman. I agree that powerful arguments and detailed empirical studies would be better, but, as sometimes happens in detective stories, a somewhat weaker, more solitary, and more adventurous strategy may succeed against the kidnapping of scientific disciplines by science warriors where others have failed. (viii)

 

The book does achieve this success and, as I have argued, it offers much more in the way of both “powerful arguments” and, especially, “empirical studies” than Latour here suggests. Accordingly, a deeper conceptual and, thus, more deeply philosophical scenography of the scenes in question is not impossible. It is perhaps permissible to view the book as setting the stage for a deeper philosophical exploration in spaces more closed than, as Latour suggests, left empty by so many dichotomies and pairs, from subject and object to, not inconceivably, human and nonhuman.

Works Cited

 

• Feyerabend, Paul. Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being. Ed. Bert Terpstra. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Gross, Paul, and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• —. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991.
• —. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thêbaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
• Pielke, Roger A. Jr. “Science Policy: Policy, Politics, and Perspective.” Nature 416 (2002): 367-68.
• Serres, Michel (with Bruno Latour). Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1995.
• Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998.