Laboratory Life mock-up with Latour's image at Buell Hall,
Columbia University,
New York, 2004.|left After his early career efforts, Latour shifted his research interests to focus on laboratory scientists. Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of
Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author
Steve Woolgar. In the book, the authors undertake an
ethnographic study of a
neuroendocrinology research laboratory at the
Salk Institute. Some of Latour's positions and findings in this era provoked vehement rebuttals. Gross and Leavitt argue that Latour's position becomes absurd when applied to non-scientific contexts: e.g., if a group of coworkers in a windowless room were debating whether or not it were raining outside and went outdoors to discover raindrops in the air and puddles on the soil, Latour's hypothesis would assert that the rain was socially constructed. Similarly, philosopher
John Searle argues that Latour's "extreme social constructivist" position is seriously flawed on several points, and furthermore has inadvertently "comical results".
The Pasteurization of France After a research project examining the sociology of
primatologists, Latour followed up the themes in
Laboratory Life with
Les Microbes: guerre et paix (published in English as
The Pasteurization of France in 1988). In it, he reviews the life and career of one of France's most famous scientists
Louis Pasteur and his discovery of microbes, in the fashion of a political biography. Latour highlights the social forces at work in and around Pasteur's career and the uneven manner in which his theories were accepted. By providing more explicitly ideological explanations for the acceptance of Pasteur's work more easily in some quarters than in others, he seeks to undermine the notion that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is primarily, or even usually, a matter of experiment, evidence or reason.
Aramis, or The Love of Technology Aramis, or The Love of Technology focuses on the history of an unsuccessful mass-transit project.
Aramis PRT (personal rapid transit), a high-tech automated subway, had been developed in France during the 70s and 80s and was supposed to be implemented as a personal rapid transit system in Paris. It combined the flexibility of an automobile with the efficiency of a subway. Aramis was to be an ideal urban transportation system based on private cars in constant motion and the elimination of unnecessary transfers. This new form of transportation was intended to be as secure and inexpensive as collective transportation. The proposed system had custom-designed motors, sensors, controls, digital electronics, software and a major installation in southern Paris. But in the end, the project died in 1987. Latour argues that the technology failed not because any particular actor killed it, but because the actors failed to sustain it through negotiation and adaptation to a changing social situation. While investigating Aramis's demise, Latour delineates the tenets of
actor-network theory. According to Latour's own description of the book, the work aims "at training readers in the booming field of technology studies and at experimenting in the many new literary forms that are necessary to handle mechanisms and automatisms without using the belief that they are mechanical or automatic."
We Have Never Been Modern Latour's work ''Nous n'avons jamais été modernes : Essai d'anthropologie symétrique
was first published in French in 1991, and then in English in 1993 as We Have Never Been Modern''. Latour encouraged the reader of this anthropology of science to rethink and re-evaluate our mental landscape. He evaluated the work of scientists and contemplated the contribution of the
scientific method to knowledge and work, blurring the distinction across various fields and disciplines. Latour argued that society has never really been modern and promoted nonmodernism (or amodernism) over
postmodernism,
modernism, or antimodernism. His stance was that we have never been modern and minor divisions alone separate Westerners now from other collectives. Latour viewed modernism as an era that believed it had annulled the entire past in its wake. He presented the antimodern reaction as defending such entities as spirit, rationality, liberty, society, God, or even the past. Postmoderns, according to Latour, also accepted the modernistic abstractions as if they were real. In contrast, the nonmodern approach reestablished symmetry between science and technology on the one hand and society on the other. Latour also referred to the impossibility of returning to premodernism because it precluded the large-scale experimentation which was a benefit of modernism. Latour attempted to prove through case studies the fallacy in the old object/subject and Nature/Society compacts of modernity, which can be traced back to Plato. He rendered the object/subject distinction as simply unusable and charted a new approach towards knowledge, work, and circulating reference.
''Pandora's Hope'' ''Pandora's Hope
(1999) marks a return to the themes Latour explored in Science in Action
and We Have Never Been Modern''. It uses independent but thematically linked essays and case studies to question the authority and reliability of scientific knowledge. Latour uses a narrative, anecdotal approach in a number of the essays, describing his work with
pedologists in the Amazon rainforest, the development of the pasteurisation process, and the research of French atomic scientists at the outbreak of the Second World War. Latour states that this specific, anecdotal approach to science studies is essential to gaining a full understanding of the discipline: "The only way to understand the reality of science studies is to follow what science studies do best, that is, paying close attention to the details of scientific practice" (p. 24). Some authors have criticised Latour's methodology, including Katherine Pandora, a history of science professor at the University of Oklahoma. In her review of ''Pandora's Hope'', Katherine Pandora states: "[Latour's] writing can be stimulating, fresh and at times genuinely moving, but it can also display a distractingly mannered style in which a rococo zeal for compounding metaphors, examples, definitions and abstractions can frustrate even readers who approach his work with the best of intentions (notwithstanding the inclusion of a nine-page glossary of terms and liberal use of diagrams in an attempt to achieve the utmost clarity)". In addition to his epistemological concerns, Latour also explores the political dimension of science studies in ''Pandora's Hope''. Two of the chapters draw on
Plato's Gorgias as a means of investigating and highlighting the distinction between content and context. As Katherine Pandora states in her review: "It is hard not to be caught up in the author's obvious delight in deploying a classic work from antiquity to bring current concerns into sharper focus, following along as he manages to leave the reader with the impression that the protagonists Socrates and Callicles are not only in dialogue with each other but with Latour as well."
"Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" In a 2004 article, Latour questioned the fundamental premises on which he had based most of his career, asking, "Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?" He undertakes a trenchant critique of his own field of study and, more generally, of social criticism in contemporary academia. He suggests that critique, as currently practised, is bordering on irrelevancy. To maintain any vitality, Latour argues that social critiques require a drastic reappraisal: "our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget." (p. 231) To regain focus and credibility, Latour argues that social critiques must embrace
empiricism, to insist on the "cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude – to speak like
William James". (p. 233) Latour suggests that about 90 per cent of contemporary social criticism displays one of two approaches, which he terms "the fact position and the fairy position." (p. 237) The fairy position is
anti-fetishist, arguing that "objects of belief" (e.g., religion, arts) are merely concepts created by the projected wishes and desires of the "naive believer"; the "fact position" argues that individuals are dominated, often covertly and without their awareness, by external forces (e.g., economics, gender). (p. 238) "Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?" asks Latour: no matter which position you take, "You're always right!" (p. 238–239) Social critics tend to use anti-fetishism against ideas they personally reject; to use "an unrepentant positivist" approach for fields of study they consider valuable; all the while thinking as "a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish." (p. 241) These inconsistencies and
double standards go largely unrecognised in social critique because "there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position." (p. 241) The practical result of these approaches being taught to millions of students in elite universities for several decades is a widespread and influential "critical barbarity" that has—like a malign virus created by a "
mad scientist"—thus far proven impossible to control. Most troubling, Latour notes that critical ideas have been appropriated by those he describes as
conspiracy theorists, including
global warming deniers and the
9/11 Truth movement: "Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but I am worried to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland, many of the weapons of social critique." (p. 230) The conclusion of the article is to argue for a positive framing of critique, to help understand how matters of concern can be supported rather than undermined: "The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by
Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution." Latour's article has been highly influential within the field of
postcritique, an intellectual movement within
literary criticism and
cultural studies that seeks to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of
critique,
critical theory, and
ideological criticism. The literary critic
Rita Felski has named Latour as an important precursor to the project of postcritique.
Reassembling the Social In
Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour continues a reappraisal of his work, developing what he calls a "practical
metaphysics", which calls "real" anything that an actor (one whom we are studying) claims as a source of motivation for action. So if someone says, "I was inspired by God to be charitable to my neighbours" we are obliged to recognise the "
ontological weight" of their claim, rather than attempting to replace their belief in God's presence with "social stuff", like class, gender,
imperialism, etc. Latour's nuanced metaphysics demands the existence of a plurality of worlds, and the willingness of the researcher to chart ever more. He argues that researchers must give up the hope of fitting their actors into a structure or framework, but Latour believes the benefits of this sacrifice far outweigh the downsides: "Their complex metaphysics would at least be respected, their recalcitrance recognised, their objections deployed, their multiplicity accepted." For Latour, to talk about
metaphysics or
ontology—what really is—means paying close empirical attention to the various, contradictory institutions and ideas that bring people together and inspire them to act. Here is Latour's description of metaphysics: If we call metaphysics the discipline inspired by the philosophical tradition that purports to define the basic structure of the world, then empirical metaphysics is what the controversies over agencies lead to, since they ceaselessly populate the world with new drives and, as ceaselessly, contest the existence of others. The question then becomes how to explore the actors' own metaphysics. A more traditional metaphysicist might object, arguing that this means there are multiple, contradictory realities, since there are "controversies over agencies" – since there is a plurality of contradictory ideas that people claim as a basis for action (God, nature, the state, sexual drives, personal ambition, and so on). This objection manifests the most important difference between traditional philosophical metaphysics and Latour's nuance: for Latour, there is no "basic structure of reality" or a single, self-consistent world. An unknowably large multiplicity of realities, or "worlds" in his terms, exists–one for each actor's sources of
agency, inspirations for action. In this, Latour is remarkably close to
B.F. Skinner's position in
Beyond Freedom and Dignity and the philosophy of
Radical Behaviourism. Actors bring "the real" (metaphysics) into being. The task of the researcher is not to find one "basic structure" that explains agency, but to recognise "the metaphysical innovations proposed by ordinary actors". Mapping those metaphysical innovations involves a strong dedication to
relativism, Latour argues. The relativist researcher "learns the actors' language," records what they say about what they do, and does not appeal to a higher "structure" to "explain" the actor's motivations. The relativist "takes seriously what [actors] are obstinately saying" and "follows the direction indicated by their fingers when they designate what 'makes them act'". The relativist recognises the plurality of metaphysics that actors bring into being, and attempts to map them rather than reducing them to a single structure or explanation. == In the science wars ==