Bruno Latour in Pieces Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, series editors Bruno Latour in Pieces An Intellectual Biography Henning Schmidgen Translated by Gloria Custance Fordham University Press New York 2015 Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro- duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This work was originally published in German as Henning Schmidgen, Bruno Latour zur Einführung © 2011, Junius Verlag. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persis- tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition Contents List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works ix Acknow ledg ments xiii Introduction 1 1. Exegesis and Ethnology 9 2. A Phi los o pher in the Laboratory 25 3. Machines of Tradition 40 4. Pandora and the History of Modernity 54 5. Of Actants, Forces, and Things 68 6. Science and Action 83 7. Questions Concerning Technology 96 8. The Coming Parliament 114 Conclusion 133 Timeline 141 Notes 145 Bibliography 165 Index 167 vii Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works AT Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. CB La clef de Berlin et autres leçons d’un amateur de sciences. Paris: La Découverte, 1993. CR “Comment rédistribuer le Grand Partage?” Revue de synthèse 3, no. 110 (1983): 203– 236. EC “The Enlightenment Without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres’ Philosophy.” In Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffi ths, 83– 97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. FR “The Force and the Reason of Experiment.” In Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. Homer E. Le Grand, 49– 80. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1990. IC Les idéologies de la compétence en milieu industriel à Abidjan. Sciences Humaines, Série études industrielles 9. Abidjan: ORSTOM, 1974. LL1 Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientifi c Facts. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979 (with Steve Woolgar). LL2 Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientifi c Facts. 2nd ed., with a new postscript and index by the authors. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986 (with Steve Woolgar). LLF La vie de laboratoire: La production des faits scientifi ques. Trans. Michel Biezunski. Paris: La Découverte, 1988 (with Steve Woolgar). ix x Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works MI Les microbes: Guerre et paix, suivi de Irréductions. Collection Pandore 3. Paris: Métalié, 1984. ML The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’État. Trans. Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage, and revised by the author. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. MoE An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. NB We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. PF The Pasteurization of France. Trans. John Law and Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988 (revised version of MI). PH Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. PN Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. PV Paris ville invisible. Paris: La Découverte/Les empêcheur de penser en rond, 1998 (with Emilie Hermant). PVE Paris: Invisible City. Trans. Liz Carey- Libbrecht. Online ed., without images. http:// www.bruno -latour .fr /sites /default /fi les / downloads /viii _paris -city -gb .pdf . RC “On Recalling ANT.” In Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard, 15– 25. Oxford: Blackwell/Malden, Mass.: So cio log i cal Review, 1999. RdS “La rhétorique de la science: Pouvoir et devoir dans un article de science exacte.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 13 (1977): 81– 95 (with Paolo Fabbri). RP “Pourquoi Péguy se répète-t-il? Pourquoi est- il illisible?” in Péguy écrivain. Colloque du centenaire, Orléans, Septembre 1973, 76– 102. Paris: Klincksieck, 1977. RS Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network- Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. SIA Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works xi TD “Technology Is Society Made Durable.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, ed. John Law, 103– 131. London: Routledge, 1991. TRS Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. VE “Les ‘vues’ de l’esprit: Une introduction à l’anthropologie des sciences et des techniques.” Culture technique 14 (1985): 5– 29. Ac know ledg ments This book is an extended and updated version of the second edition of Bruno Latour zur Einführung, published with Junius Press in Hamburg in 2013 (1st ed., 2011). The themes and arguments developed in this book were fi rst presented at the fi fth Eu ro pe an Conference of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) in Berlin in 2008. An extended version of this pre sen ta tion was published in German as “Die Materialität der Dinge? Bruno Latour und die Wissenschaftsge- schichte” in Bruno Latours Kollektive: Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozi- alen, ed. Georg Kneer, Markus Schroer, and Erhard Schüttpelz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 15– 46. A slightly revised En glish version of this paper appeared as “The Materiality of Things? Bruno Latour, Charles Péguy, and the History of Science,” History of the Human Sciences 26, no. 1 (2013): 3– 28. I would like to express my sincere thanks for the critical discussions of my initial thoughts and arguments with Hans- Jörg Rheinberger, Andrew Pickering, Michael Lynch, Robyn Smith, Steven Meyer, Didier Debaise, and Bruno Latour. In the course of the research that followed, many people gave their kind support. Roger Guillemin, Paolo Fabbri, and Bernward Joerges agreed im- mediately to answer my questions. Bruno Latour provided biographical and bibliographic information and responded to my inquiries almost at the speed of light. The anonymous referees of HHS offered valuable comments and criticism. xiii xiv Ac know ledg ments Conversations with Bruce Clarke, Pamela Kort, Peter Weingart, and particularly my ongoing dialogue with Gustav Roßler, the principal trans- lator of Latour’s writings into German, did much to clarify my ideas. Equally important was the interaction with the students in my Latour and ANT seminars in Weimar and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the post- graduates at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept. III) in Berlin. My thanks again to Skúli Sigurdsson for his helpful suggestions and pointers. I am grateful to Christian Reiss and Tomoko Mamine for read- ing, correcting, and commenting on parts of the German version of the book. I also thank Gloria Custance for her translation and editing work on the En glish text as well as Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers for their stimulating support. Bruno Latour in Pieces Introduction . one never follows in order to reproduce. Bruno Latour has many faces.1 He is known to many as an ethnographer of the world of everyday technology who in meticulous studies has shown how seemingly trivial things, like a key or a safety belt, actively intervene in our behavior. Others know Latour as an essayist very well versed in the- ory who charged the phi los o phers of postmodernity— principally Lyotard and Baudrillard but also Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida—that their thinking merely revolves around artifi cial sign- worlds and who confronted them with the provocative assertion that “we have never been modern.” In addition, Latour is an enormously productive social scientist, who with empirical studies such as Laboratory Life and Aramis has largely con- tributed to defi ning the fi eld of research known internationally as science and technology studies (STS). In this role, Latour is also known— despite having critiqued postmodernism himself— as an instigator of the so-called science wars, which raged especially in the United States and France over 1 2 Introduction the alleged misappropriation of natural science by postmodernism-infl uenced representatives of the humanities and social sciences. Over and above this, Latour has more recently distinguished himself as the visionary of a “parliament of things,” in which the barriers between nature and society are to be broken down in the name of a politi cal ecol ogy, and he is also the programmatic spokesperson of a “new sociology for a new society,” a theory and practice of social science whose core focus is the sci- entifi c and technological networks that have contributed to the genesis and dissemination of “hybrids” and “quasi- objects,” of seminatural, semiartifi - cial issues of contention— from the AIDS virus to global climate change. Bruno Latour has indeed many faces. He is the author of an oeuvre that is as extensive as it is diverse. Since the late 1970s, Latour has produced fourteen monographs and published around 120 articles, mainly in inter- national peer- reviewed journals. He has published a series of anthologies (including with Michel Callon and Pierre Lemonnier), several interview books (including with Michel Serres and François Ewald), and an avant- garde illustrated essay about the city of Paris with the photographer and author Emilie Hermant.