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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled ObjectsAuthor(s): Roger LuckhurstSource: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006),pp. 4-17Published by: SF-TH IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241405 .

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4

SCIENCE FICTION

STUDIES,

VOLUME

33

(2006)

Roger

Luckhurst

Bruno Latour's Scientifiction:

Networks,

Assemblages,

and

Tangled

Objects

Bruno

Latour,

professor

at the Ecole

Nationale

Superieure

des Mines de

Paris,

has been a

controversial igure

in

science and

technology

studies for

twenty-five

years.

His work has hovered on the

edges

of critical

theory

in

the

humanities,

but has never

quite

been subsumed nto that

generic

French

theory

hat

Anglo-

American academies tend to construct.Instead,he has helpedrefashionSTS in

Franceand

America,

and the

influenceof his Science in

Action

(1987)

made

him

an

important

igure

in

the

so-called Science Wars of

the 1990s.

A

particular

methodology, Actor-Network

Theory

(ANT),

has been extracted

from this

early work,

although

Latourhimself has until

recently

been

reluctant o use

these

terms. Since his attack on the

philosophical

premises

of

(scientific) modernity

in

We

Have

Never Been Modern

(1993),

Latour's

work has

developed

wider

ambitions. He has

articulatedhis

project

as

aiming

to visit

successively

and to

document the

different truth

production

sites that

make

up

our

civilisation

(Crease 18).

Having

focused on the

construction of truth in

science

and

technology

and on the

sociology

of

science,

he has

recently

moved

rapidly

through

philosophy,

law, religion, art

(co-curating

he

exhibition

Iconoclash

in

2002),

and academic

critique.1

This is a

reflection of his

multi-disciplinary

training-he has

always

combined

participant-observation

nthropology

with

the

sociology

and

philosophy

of

science,

blending empirical

case

studies with

contentious

reformulationsof

method.

But this

mix

is also a

mark of his

desire

to shake

up

the

fixed

grids of

disciplines formedin the university by a modernsettlement n which he no

longer

believes. Instead,

Latour

pursues new

and

surprising

assemblages of

knowledge,

in

part

because he

insists

that the

world is

not safely

divided

between

society

and

science, politics and

nature, subjects

and

objects, social

constructions

and

reality,

but

rather is

populated

increasingly by

strange

hybrids-what

he

variously calls

risky

attachments or

tangled

objects

(Politics

22)-that

cut

across these

divides and

demandnew

ways

of thinking.

A

witty and

elegant

stylist, Latour

has

proposed that

the

hybrid genre

that I

have designed

for a

hybridtask

is what

I call

scientifiction

(Aramis

ix). He

ratherdelightfully has no awarenessthat this was Hugo Gernsback'soriginal

coinage,

in

1929, for what

became science

fiction,

but then he has

little

to say

directly

about

the

genre, which he

passingly

dismisses as

inadequate

or his

method

(Aramis viii).

Nevertheless,

this short

introduction

will

explore how

Latour's

work can

open a

number of

productive

fronts for sf

scholarship,

transvaluing eneric

knowledgein

general, butalso

proving

particularly

helpful

in

theorizing recent

hybrid

genre

fictions.








BRUNOLATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION

5

Of ANTs and Men.

In the

early part

of his

career,

Latour's central

aim,

in

common with other historians

and

sociologists

of

science,

was to

use

various

strategies

to

resituate

science and

technology

in their

perceived

relations

to

the

social world.

Science,

as formulated

slowly

in the West

by

the

scientific

revolutions

from

the seventeenth

o nineteenth

centuries,

was

rarely

interested

in its

own

history except

as a record of error

progressively

excluded

from

the

production

of truth. Social factors

only

ever

appear

n these traditional

cientific

accounts

to

explain

error. False

religious

belief, smuggled

into a

leaky

and

amateurish

aboratory, produce

incorrect

objects

like

telepathy

or

ESP;

false

ideological biases create instances ike

Lysenkoism.

Once these social intrusions

are

excluded, falsehood

is eliminated

and

the

proper path

to truth s

regained.

Good science is thereforebeyond anysocial influences. This divideof socialand

technical

knowledge produces,

for

Latour,

a

damagingpolitical configuration.

The

social

practice

of

Western

democracy

s

always

limited

by

an absoluteout-

side-Nature-to which

only

the scientific

expert

has

privileged

access,

and

whose facts are

beyond dispute.

One

can

have

as

many

different cultural

accounts as one

likes,

but

this

multiculturalism

s

only

ever

flotsam on the

sea

of

mononaturalism.

The

overlaid binaries of

social/scientific, political/natural,

subject/object,

value/fact

work,

Latour

laims,

to

render

ordinary,political

ife

impotent hrough

he threatof

incontestableNature

(Politics 10).

Latour developed three early strategies to contest this modern scientific

constitution. The first derived from

anthropology.

His

first

book,

Laboratory

Life

(a

collaboration

with

Steve

Woolgar [1979]), was the

productof two

years

of

participant-observation

n

an

American

laboratory.

Reversing

the usual

directionof the

anthropologist

rom center

to

margin,

and

directing he scientific

gaze

at science

itself,

Latour absorbed himself in

the

tribe of

laboratory

scientiststo

collect fieldworkon

the

routinely

occurring

minutiae

of

everyday

laboratorybehavior(Lab

Life 27).2

The

material

collected

contested the

image

of the

laboratory

as a

sterile,

inhuman

place, showing

that

he

practice

of

science

widely regardedby outsiders as well organised, logical, and coherent, in fact

consists of a

disordered

array

of

observations

with

which

scientists struggle to

produce order

(Lab Life

36). Some of Latour's

central

claims emerged from

this

work. The

laboratory

s a

place

saturatedwith

the social and

political, and

the technical

cannot be

artificially divorced from

these concerns, at

least in the

process

of

doing science. The

divide is

instituted later, for instance

in the

retrospective

reconstructionof

laboratory

practice in the

scientific research

paper.

Those

incontestable

scientific facts or

essences are

not waiting to be

uncovered,

but

are the

end

result of long and

laborious

procedures

that are

messy andconfusing.

Yet

Latour's point is

misunderstood f he is

seen as merely arguing

for the

social

construction of

science.

He

develops a critique of

semioticians who

uphold

an

absolutedivide between

world and

word, reality

and anguage. Latour

argues

that

the

laboratory

s

a

configurationof machines

(Lab Life

65), a

multiple, overlapping set

of

tracking devices that

transcribe and

translate

material

substances nto

grids, graphs, logbooks,

codings,

diagrams,equations,

and

language.

The

cultural

relativist

might saythatthe

objective reality

referred








6

SCIENCE

ICTION

TUDIES,

VOLUME 3

(2006)

to is an end product of

these

transcriptions,

but Latour will later

develop

the

point that

in

this

complex array

of

inscription

of

the real into

signification,

we

never detect the rupture between things and signs and we never face the

impositionof arbitrary

and

discrete

signs

on

shapeless

and continuousmatter

(Pandora's Hope 56).

Latour

wants to

challenge

the

rejection

of social and

culturalfactors

in

science,

but

he is

equally

concerned

to

reject

facile accounts

thatreduce everything

n

science to social constructionor mattersof

representa-

tion and

interpretation.

For

Latour,

this

merely

reverses the

polarity

of the

insidious object/subject

divide,

and his later work aims to

think

about

a

new

dispensation

that cuts across

this, by

talking

about alliances

of

humans and

nonhumans see

next

section, below).

Latourcontinues o use the methodsof fieldwork, suggestingthat t canopen

multiple

rontsof

critique

n

addition o la tradition

philosophique

des

commen-

taires

de texts

(Monde

Pluriel

6;

the

philosophical

tradition of

textual

commentary ).

The second

strategy

of contestationcomes from the

history

of

science. Scientific

practice

is

often

presentist, proceeding by

the erasure of

incorrect

assumptions,

rival

hypotheses,

and

wrong turns.

A

general

tactic to

resocialize science has been to recover the social of

history

of truth

(to

use

Steven

Shapin's phrase).

This

historicist tactic looks at

exemplary

nstancesof

the institutionaland

ideological

formation of scientific

naturalism,

scientific

controversies(treating winners and losers symmetrically),or instancesof

lost or abandoned heories. Latourborrowedmuch

of the methodof the

English

historians and sociologists of science sometimes called the

EdinburghSchool,

and

published

The

Pasteurization of

France

in

1988.3

In

this

study,

Louis

Pasteur's

genius

is

analytically decomposed: he

is

no

longer

the heroic

discoverer of the microbial

transmissionof disease

againstunenlightened

ivals

in

the mid-nineteenth

entury,

but is

the master of

strategicallycombining

his

laboratory findings

with

a vast array of different

elements and

interests that

stretch far

beyond

his closed vacuum

flasks.

In

order for

his

theory

to win

out,

Pasteur binds together a set of interests that include farmers, army doctors,

Louis

Bonaparte,hygienists, newspapers, French

nationalism,the

bureaucrats

of

the Second

Empire,

cows,

industrialists,popular and specialistjournals,

transport xperts,

and

the FrenchAcademy, as

well as the

microbesthemselves.

This sort of

sociological

history

of

science has become very familiar (it has

partly dislodged

the

heroic,

internalistscientific

biography,for

instance). Yet

the

apparently chaotic

listing

of

Pasteur's interests,

breaching all apparent

categorization

or

ordering,

has become

Latour's

signaturedevice. Elsewhere,

he lists some of

the interests at

play

in

the crisis

around he

outbreakof mad

cow disease in Europe, including he EuropeanUnion, the beef market,prions

in

the

laboratory,

politicians,vegetarians,public

confidence, farmers,andNobel

prize-winning

French

scientists. Does this list sound

heterogeneous? Latour

asks.

Too bad-it is

indeed this

power to establish a

hierarchy among

incommensurable

ositions for which the

collective must now

take responsibil-

ity

(Politics 113). This listing is the mark

of Latour'sthird

strategyto contest

the

modern

scientific

settlement: he

actor-network.








BRUNO

LATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION

7

The

Pasteurisation

of France

is the

book-length

concrete

example

that

enacted

the

theory

worked out

in

Latour's most

important

arly

book,

Science

in Action

(1987).

In

this,

Latour

races how a

scientist

might

succeed

enough

to

make

a

proposition

into a

black

box,

a

statement

fixed

as

an

uncontested

scientific

fact,

with

any

history

of contest

or

controversy

in its

production

completely

erased.

He starts with the small-the

rhetoric

of

the

scientific

paper-and

builds a model that

incorporates

more and more

elements:

the

laboratory, colleagues,

funders

from

industry,

government,

or the

military,

machines,

technology

transfers,

other

sciences,

the

educated

public,

the

uneducated

public,

the

press,

and so on. As

before,

the aim is

to show

that

science is

thoroughly

ocialized and

produced

hrough

heterogeneous

hains

of

association : We are neverconfrontedwith science, technology, andsociety,

but with a

gamut

of weaker

and

stronger

associations

(Science

in Action 100-

101).

Althoughthis

deliberately

ntermixes

elements,

Latour s careful

to

argue

that a

successful statementalso

needs to form a

disciplinary

structure,

a

policed

realm

of

experts and

expertise,

an

inside and

an

outside. He

does not break

down

the conditions for

rigorous

scientific

knowledge;

however,

inverting

received

wisdom, he claims that the

harder,

the

purerthe science is

inside,

the

furtheroutside the

scientists have

to

go

(Science

in Action

156).

There is

no

such

thing

as

pure

cience,

because these are the

laboratories

hathave to seek

the most funding, the most governmental and industrial support. Big

technoscience

only survives

by

connecting

itself to the

state and the

military:

technoscience s

partof

a

war machine

and shouldbe

studiedas

such

(Science

in

Action

172).

Science

is

therefore successful

not to

the degree that

it isolates

itself

from

society, but to

the

degree that it

creates

networks and

multiplies

connections,

and to

the extent

that

it

can be

assessed

by the number

of points

linked, the

strength and

length

of the

linkage, the

nature of the

obstacles

(Science

in

Action

201). The

starkest

symbol of

Latour's

rejection of

asocial

theories of

science is how

he

presents the

equation

or formula:

the

purest,

compressedstatementof incontestable ndunchanging act to some, the equation

is for

Latoura

knot,

somethingthat

succeeds

because it is so

well

connected,

tightly

binding

together as it

does the maximum

heterogeneous

elements into a

single

enunciation.

The

network s

figuredby

Latour

hroughmetaphors

f

knots and oops.

One

of

his

most lucid

expositions of

what

elements need

to be

addressed

when

considering any

scientific

concept (a term

he

often replaces

with

knot ) s a

passage

in

Pandora's

Hope

(1999).

Buildingon the

assertion

hat t]he truth

of

what

scientists

say no

longer comes

from

their breaking

away

from society,

conventions, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the

circulating

references that

cascade

througha great

numberof

transformations

and

translations

Pandora 97),

Latour ists the

five

minimal oops

that need

to

be

traced:

first,

mobilizationof

the

world, which is the

complex, variegated

set

of

processes

for

transporting

objects from

the

real world into

scientific

discourse;

second,

autonomization,

which is the way

a

discipline moves

from

amateur

to

professional,

forming its own

criteria and

expertise for

scientific

knowledge

along the

way; third,

alliances, which

reverse

autonomysince

here








8

SCIENCE

ICTION

TUDIES,

VOLUME

3

(2006)

diverse, extra-scientific

interests are enrolled n the

support

of a

particular

science

(kings

in

cartography,

ndustrialists

n

chemistry,

the

military

n

atomic

physics, and

so on); fourth,public

representation,

ince

scientistswho had to

travel the world to make it

mobile,

to convince

colleagues

to

lay

siege

to

ministers and boards

of

directors,

now have

to take care of their relations

with

another

outside world

of civilians:

reporters,

pundits,

and the man and

woman

in the

street

(Pandora105);

finally,

the knotof the scientific

concept itself,

harderto

study yet part

of this

topology

because it is a

very

tight

knot at

the

centre of a net

(Pandora 06).

These ideas

helped

form Actor-Network

Theory.

This is

not

solely

identified

with

Latour, and its

origins

are often

ascribed o a

joint

paper

Latour

wrote with

Michel Callon in 1981, entitled Unscrewingthe Big Leviathan. ANT has

since been taken

up by

some

English

sociologists,

such as John

Law,

who sees

its

value in the

productive ensionbetween the

centeredactor and the

decentered

network,

enabling the critic to move

across different scales of

explanation.4

Subsuming

Latour into the

familiar

post-structuralism

of

Lyotard

and

Deleuze/Guattari,Lawregards

ANT

as

a semiotic machinefor

waging

war on

essential

differences

(7).

Latour has been

rather more

circumspect:

he has

registeredhis

suspicionof the terms Actor

(he prefers

the term

actant,

since this

might also include

nonhumans),

Network

(which risks

becoming

a dead

metaphor,a statictopologyor gridrather hansomethingdynamically orged by

science

in

process),

and

Theory (which

Latour

claims to avoid

as it would

constrainhis

ethnomethodology f

following

actors

in

each

fresh

situation).

He

even

suspects

the

hyphen etween

Actor-Network as

fixing a

binary between

individual

agency and

systemic

forces that he

wished to

displace (see On

Recalling

ANT ).

Latourhas not

been able to kill

off the term-a

lesson

perhaps

thata single

actorcannot

necessarilycontrolthe

network-and has

more

recently

embraced it

fully,

publishing

Reassembling he Social

(2005), his

first

introductory xposition

of ANT. For

Latourthe main

tenet of

ANT is that

the actors themselvesmakeeverything, includingtheir own frames, theirown

theories, their own

contexts, their

own

metaphysics

( On

Using ANT 67).

All

of

Latour's work in

Science

in Actionand

beyond

might seem an

aggressive,

counter-intuitive

ociological theoryof

science,

intent

on

dethroning

scientific

legitimacy.

In

fact

Latour

claims it is a form of

almost

naive realism:

as his

comments

about

ANT

suggest, he

claims

he has imposed

nothing,

but has

merely

followed

scientific actors

themselves,

trackinghow they

behave,

andthe

connections and

networksthat

they create.

Embedded n

all of Latour's

work is

a

strong critique

of

sociological

and

critical

schools that

seek social

explana-

tions of science. Latourdoes notwish to fashionexplanations hatdecode what

his

actors do.

He is opposed

to the

attempt to

demystify or

expose real

conditions as a

Marxist

might,

and

distances

himself from

sociologies

thathave

the

arrogant

belief that

they can

explain

the actors any

better

than the actors

themselves.

For

Latour,

the

social as a

term of

explanation needs

to be

rethought: t is not a

sort of

ether that invisibly

permeateseverything

else as a

hidden

context, but is

the

resultof the

associations or

links that bind

together

scientific,

political, cultural,

economic,

and other

practices.

He appeals to a








BRUNO

LATOUR'S

CIENTIFICTION

9

sociology of associations

to

replace

all critical

sociologies

that use

predeter-

mined categories

for

determining

ocial

groups.

Each social

object

is a

specific

set

of associations that

produces

its

own terms

of

analysis.

This approachhas the

pragmatist's

air of the distrustof

any

system,

and

indeed Latour has more than once

appealed

to the work of

William James

to

supporthis own

position.

Yet

pragmatism

can often be

a

faux-naif

stance,

designed

to disable

critics. Latour's

work

has

undoubtedly

become

more

explicitly

political,

and he

has

taken

aim

at the

political

conservatism

nherent

in

the

ideological

constructof

Science wielded

in

the Science Wars of the

1990s.

In

Politics

of Nature

(2004),

Latourwants to

liberate the

practice

of

the

(lower

case,

plural)

sciences

from

the

ideological

stranglehold

f

(capitalized,

singular)

Science. This will

accomplish

nothing

ess thanthe

revitalizationof

democracy,

and

may

even

solve the clash of

fundamentalisms etween East and

West,

as

explored

in

his reaction to the

events

of

September

11,

War

of

the

Worlds

(2002).

This

peace-making desire

is

perhaps

a

response

to

Donna

Haraway's

observation that

Latour's

method and view of

scientific

practice

in

Science in

Action was

insistently war-like:

science

works

by

strenuous

battles

to

win

controversies

and outflank

rivals,

to marshal

armies,

and so on.

The

heroic,

masculinist

narrative

of

science was

being

unwittinglyrepeated

by

Latour:

The

story told is told

by

the

same

story (Modest_Witness 4). This is acute: after

all,

the

French title

of Latour's

book

on

Pasteur

might

have been

more

literally

translated

as

lThe

Microbes: War

and Peace. Yet

Latour's irenic

turn

in

the

1990s is

attributable ot

just to

Haraway's

critique,

but also

to the

influence

of

the French

philosopher

and historian

of science

Michel

Serres,

who in a

book-

length interview with

Latour

spoke

of

working

in

a

spirit

of

pacifism

against

the

contest of the

faculties

(Serres 32).

Finally,

though, his turn

to the

political

was driven

by the

challenge

Latour

mounted

n

We

Have

Never

BeenModem

to

the

war

set

up between

subjects

and objects

by the modern

settlement.Let's

now

turnto this importantpolemical intervention.

The Modern

Settlement

and Latour's

Nonmodernism.

Fromhis

early

books,

we

already have a

sense

that Latour

regards

the scientific

revolutions of

the

seventeenth

century as

a

very

particular

organization of

the

world.

This is

formulatedas

the modern

constitution

or

settlement

in We

Have

Never Been

Modem,

a

separation

of

Nature and

Culture

into two

distinct

ontologies;

according to

Latour,

modernity

works

obsessively

at

purification, the

categorizing

of the

world

according

to a

binary

that sorts

humans from

nonhumans,

ubjects rom

objects. A

politics

emergesfrom

this

dispensation

hat

is inflexibleandoftenviolent:nature s to be dominated;othercultures,

refusing

to

accept

the

disciplining of

the

progressive, linear

time

of

modernity,

are

regardedas

objects, sunk in

nature.Savages

and

superstitionsmix

thesocial

and

the natural

indiscriminately;

science

progressively

separates

these

spheres.

Modernisation

onsists in

continually

exiting

from an

obscure

age that

mingled

the

needs of

society with

scientific

truth n

order

to

enter intoa

new age

thatwill

finally

distinguish

clearly what

belongs to

atemporal

nature

and

what comes

from

humans

(We

Have

Never 71).








10 SCIENCE ICTION

TUDIES,VOLUME

3 (2006)

For

Latour, this modem

constitutionhas

always operated

mperfectly:

it

is

involved in

a doublecreation

of a social context and a nature hat

escapes

that

very context (16), andyet regardsNature(the guarantorof scientific truth)as

pre-given

andextra-discursive.

f

Natureand

Culture

are

co-produced,however,

they

are

in

constant contact and

dialogue, conducting

endless

translationsand

mediations. The

fury

of

purification

s driven

by

a secret

history

of

miscegena-

tion,

of the

intermixing

of

categories.

We have

never been modem.

Latour

argues

that

this realization

has been

thrust on us

by

recent

developments

that

confront

us

with a

rapid proliferation

of

hybrid

objects

that

confound

modem

categories. Are ozone

holes, global

warming,

AIDS, epidemics

of

obesity

and

allergy,

hospital

superbugs,

Asian bird

flu,

and

mad cow disease the

product

of

natural or cultural, human or nonhuman, processes? They cannot be

sorted -categorized

or

resolved-in

any straightforward

way.

Indeed,

in

the

case

of global

warming,

the

passage

to

black-boxed act is

continually

rustrated

and

scientific

argument

inextricably

intermingled

with

political, industrial,

ecological, and

myriad

other

interests. We have

moved from

mattersof

fact

to

mattersof

concem,

situating

he

practice

of

science

in

wider

networksand

longer

chains of association.

This

transitionhas been

discussedby some

critics as the

passage

from an era

of Science

to one of

Research,

a move from

autonomy

to the

imbricationof

science, culture, andeconomy: all these domains had become so 'intemally'

heterogeneousand

'externally'

nterdependent,

ven

transgressive,

hat

hey

had

ceased to

be distinctive

and

distinguishable

Nowotny et al.

1). Latoursees it

as the

recognition

of

the

very

hybridity

hat was

always

induced

by the modem

settlement.

Hybrid

objects

have no clear

boundaries,

no

sharp separation

between

their own

hard kemel

and their

environment,

he

expands

in

Politics

of

Nature:

They

first

appear

as

mattersof

concern,

as new

entities

thatprovoke

perplexity

and thus

speech

in

those

who

gather

around

them,

and

argue over

them

(Politics

24, 66).

He

suggests

we

need

a

re-formulationof

the

binaries

thatrecognizes this increasinglypopulousexcludedmiddle, a space inwhich we

need

to

graspthe

nonseparability

f

quasi-objects nd

quasi-subjects (WeHave

Never

139). This

would

in

turn

produce a

new

constitutionand

thereforea new

politics:

It

is

time,

perhaps,

to

speak

of

democracyagain, but

of

a

democracy

extended to

things

themselves

(We

Have Never

141).

Latour's

polemic appeared

at

the time

when

many critical

accounts of

modemity were

being producedunderthe

umbrellaof

postmodernism.

Some of

his

formulationsmight look

postmodern-perhaps most

obviously the

idea that

abandoning

the

linear time of

modernity

will

open up

multiple,

co-existent

times.5 Yet Latour is scathingabout the postmodern urn. Whether it is Jean-

Francois

Lyotard's

collapse of

metanarrativesinto

the

petits

recits

of

incommensurable anguage

games

or

JiirgenHabermas's

argumentagainst the

postmodernsfor a

return to

separate

spheres of

knowledge,

Latour

considers

these

as

desperate

rearguard

ctions to

maintain

he purification

hat

dominated

the modern

settlement. The

modish

Jean

Baudrillard

xemplifies for Latoura

pointless

picking

over

the ruins

of the

modern,

incapableof

conceiving

any other

dispensationand

sunk

in

nihilism. In

this

decadent

phase, Latour

worries that








BRUNO LATOUR'S

SCIENTIFICTION

11

critique has

collapsed

into extreme

relativism

or

conspiracy

theory ( Why

Has

Critique Run Out of Steam?

228).

He

sees this as

sharing

much with

a

regressive anti-modernview that is prepared o annihilateall the virtues of the

Enlightenment

long

with

its

vices.

Instead, Latour

declares

himself a

nonmodernist: We

can

keep

the

Enlightenmentwithout

modernity We

Have Never

135).

This

stance

crucially

involves making the

subject/object

divide far

more

porous,

and

rethinking

and

extendingmodem

humanism,

which has sorted

according

to a small

number

of

powers,

leaving

the rest

of the

world with

nothing

but

simple

mute forces

(We

Have

Never

138).

The constitutionneeds to be

reconfigured

so that

humansand

nonhumansare networked

ogether

in

a new kind of

collective. This collective

hasbeenenvisionedby Latour nPolitics of Nature,where democracy anonly

be conceived

if

it can

freely

traversethe borderbetween science and

politics,

in

order to add a series

of new voices

to

the

discussion

... the

voices of

nonhumans 69). That

compulsive need

of

the moderns

to

purify

is

not

simply

dissolved

(it

is still

helpful

to

have these

categories),

but the

nonmodernist

values acts of

linkage,

association,

and

heterogeneous

assemblage:

We shall

always o

from

hemixed o

the

still

more

mixed,

rom he

complicated

to the still more

complicated....We no

longer xpect

rom

he future hat t will

emancipate

s fromall our

attachments;n the

contrary,we expect

hat

t

will

attachus withtighterbonds o the morenumerousrowdsof alienswho have

become

ully-fledged

members

f

the collective.

Politics

191)

This

is

the maturevision of Latour's

later work.

Criticism of Latour's work is

often tied to

methodologicalquestions

in

the

sociology

of

science. The key

objection s termed

by SimonSchaffer

the

heresy

of

hylozoism,

an attribution

f

purpose,

will

and life to

inanimate

matter,

and

of human

nterests o the

nonhuman

182).

David Bloor

has

similarlyobjected,

in

much

harsher

erms,

to

Latour's

ransgression f the

foundational

hilosophi-

cal axioms of modernsociology (see also Elam). Latour'sdefense rangesfrom

the

disarmingly

honest

(he suggests to one

group

of

interviewers that

his

philosophicalapparatus

s

really not very

deep

[Crease 19]), to the

more

serious view

that Bloor's

sociology

quintessentially

belongs to the

modern

settlement

tself, relying

as it does

on the

strictKantian

divorce of

subjectiveand

objective

worlds that

Latour is

specifically

trying to

unravel ( For

David

Bloor ).

It is

of

course a

provocation o

talk about the

interests

or voices '

of

nonhumans,

and it is in

total conflict with

the

hermeneutics hat

still dominate

critique.

Yet

perhaps

readersof SFS

are less

traumatized

by this move

than the

philosophersof STS. Not only are we more familiar with interdisciplinary

formulations

of

post-humanism

(for

instance,

in

Donna

Haraway's recent

attempts

o

articulatea

companion pecies

kinship as part of a

wider

critique

of

modernity:

see her

Cyborgs

o

CompanionSpecies ),

but also

because the

fantasmatic

work of sf

has been

consistently

bound up with

imagining

the

interestsof

the

nonhuman,and

has been

fascinatedwith

theproductionof

those

hybrid forms the

modern

settlement

would deem

monstrous.








12

SCIENCE

FICTION

STUDIES, VOLUME

33

(2006)

Implications for

SF.

I

hope

that this brief

survey

of

Latour's

work

has

already

begun to

spark

potential

ways

of

reading

sf,

even as his work

veers

across

both

the

forms

of

critique

and the

modern/postmodern

aradigm

hat

has tended

to

dominate

sf

criticism

in

recent times.

Here,

I

just

want to sketch

out

the

ways

in

which I

think

Latourcan

enable

new

directions

in

sf

scholarship.

First, it

is

obvious that

there

cannot

be a

Latourian

theory

that can

be

abstracted

and

subsequently applied

to

sf,

like

all those

theoretical

canning

factories that

process

the raw

material

of

sf and turn

it into the

product

of

a

particular

school.

Instead,

sf

can

be

thought

of as a link

that can

be tied into

many

different

kinds of

chains of association

or networks

of

influence,

sometimes

in

surprising

or

unpredictable

ways.

This

is how

it

appears

in

Latour's own

Aramis,

his

scientifictional

tudy

of

a

revolutionary ransport

project

for Paris

that failed in

the

1980s.

As

Mark

Bould

and

Sherryl

Vint

explore later

in

this

issue,

Aramis is

presented

in

a

cacophony

of

voices:

political,

industrial,

financial,

and

technological

interest

groups

are

cited

directly,

interspersed

with a

dialoguebetween

a

cynical

professor and

a

naive

STS

student;

this

cacophony

is

in turn

cut

across

by fragments

of

a

theory

of

technology,

along

with

lengthy

citations from

Mary

Shelley's

Frankenstein.

Shelley's proto-sf text

helps

Latour

imagine

the

way

in

which

large

technoscientific

projects

are

stitched

together

with

improvised

elements,

which

canthenescapedesignedintentionsanddeveloptheirown nonhuman ctions.

This

mythic

structure

was

also in

the

minds of

many

different

participants

n

the

Aramis

case: it

was

formative,

rather

than

secondary or

reflective. Sf

might

appear

ike this

in

other

stories: for

example,

in

the

oft-told

way that the

genre

contributed

formatively

to

the

military-scientific-industrial

roductionof

the

nuclear

bomb.

H.G.

Wells's The

World Set

Free

(1914)

was

one of

the

important

inks

in

Leo

Szilard's ardent

political

campaigning or an

American

atomic

program;

Wells

was

then

hooked

into a

very different

(and

in

the end

weaker)

networkof

resources

for the

atomic

scientists

lobbying

to stop

first-use

of the bomb, andthen for world governmentafterfirst-use.

We

might

also think

in

Latourian

ways

about

the weird

networks

of

connections that

produce

science-fictional

religions-one of the

more

striking

phenomena

associated with

the

genre

since

1945.

Hubbard's

Dianetics

took

resources from

experimental

psychology, the

discourse

of

the

American

engineer,

space-opera

plots, and John

W.

Campbell's

messianic

belief in

the

socially transformative

potential of sf.

The

Raelian

group

similarly

binds

together

genetics and

cloning with an

eschatology

borrowed

from

Arthur

C.

Clarke.

These

networks of

association

might be

weak,

thinly

populated,

and

definitively marginal, but Latour allows us to read how these bizarrely

heterogeneous

formations

operate. The

complex

socio-politico-scientific

embeddedness of

sf could be

considerably

clarified by

Latour's

approach

to

networks

and

assemblages,

chains

of

weaker and

stronger

association

thatcut

across

science,

technology, and

society.

Second,

and

consequently,

the

dynamic

topology of

the

network

does

something

to

displace

the

static

topographiesof

center

and

margin

or

high and

low.

It is

not

necessarily

useful to

dissolve these

categories

entirely

(there is

a








BRUNO

LATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION

13

certain

rigidity

to the economics of

genre

publishing,

after

all),

but

they

might

be

regarded

as less

finally

determining

or sf.

Instead,

the

genre

might

be

seen

to intermix more

dynamically,

making

weaker

or

stronger

associations

across

the matrix

of

cultural

power.

Sometimes

sf

becomes

a

privileged

lens

through

which a lot of

social

processes

can be translated or the wider culture-as

in

cyberpunk

n

the 1980s (justat the time when sf

writers such as

Larry

Niven

and

JerryPournelle

successfully

connected nto the

circuitsof the New

Right

Reagan

administration).

At othertimes

sf

remains

marginal,decoupled

rom

mainstream

cultural formations and

with few kudos. This

marginality

can of

course

sometimes

generate

genuine

subcultural

energy

(as

in

the American

political

satires

of the

1950s

or

the

writings

of the

British Boom

in

the

1990s,

for

instance).

This

approachwould also be

interested

in

the

hybridizations

of

different

genres that

Gary Wolfe has called the

postgenre

fantastic

or

genre

implosion -the mixes of

Gothic,

thriller,

detective

fiction,

fantasy,

and

sf

that

have proliferated n

recent

years.

Sf criticism has been

somewhat

obsessed

with

purification,

with

the kind of

sorting

and

rigid categorization

Latour

argues

is

typical

of

the modem settlement.

Criticism, instead,

might

be

much more

interested

in

cross-fertilizations

between

genre

and

mainstream

writing

and

might judge

generic

transgressions ess

punitively.

If

we

read the

history

of sf

as nonmodernists, it might then appearthat the genre has never been mod-

ern-that it was

never a

pure form and

has

produced little

except

hybrid

writings (a

position

I

tried

to

argue

in

my

book

Science

Fiction). This

may

involve

dispensing

with

some of the

subcultural

essentiment

hatstill

attends he

genre.

Purism is

isolationism,

which

means fewer

connections and

therefore

weaker

cultural

nfluence.

Third, Latour's

sense that we

live

a

world of

proliferatinghybrids

might

actually

help

us read

recent sf.

Several

instances

spring

to

mind.

China

Mieville's New

Weird is a

fusion of

English

Gothic,

dark

fantasy,

and sf

traditions,andhis fictionsarefrequentlyorganizedaround pectacular et-pieces

of

hybrid

creaturesthat cut

across

received

categorizations.The

ichthyscaphoi

in

Iron

Council

(2004) is a

mongrel

of

whale-shark

distendedby

bio-thauma-

turgy

to

be

cathedral-sized,varicellate

shelled, metal

pipework thicker

than a

man in

ganglia

protruberant

ike prolapsed

veins,

boat-sized

fins

swinging on

oiled

hinges, a dorsal

row

of

chimneys smoking

whitely

(454). This

clatter of

adjectival

over-determination s

Mieville's

principal

strategy, and

reads

very

much

like

one of

Latour's

lists of

heterogeneous

elements,

combining

human,

animal,

and

machine.

A

similar

fascinationwith

hybridbeings

and

transformed

modes of categorization nformsJustinaRobson's Natural History(2003).

Yet

reading

sf

by means

of

Latour

does not

privilege

those hybrid

forms

usually associated

with

softer

sf.

Indeed, Latour's

insistent focus on

the

social

and

political

connections

of

scienceand

technology

alsomeans

he is

illuminating

in

reading

much hardersf

traditions.

An

exemplarytext

in this

regard

might be

Paul

McAuley's

White

Devils (2004),

which

is typical of

certaintrends n

many

ways. The

generic

location

of

McAuley's

novel is

extremely

difficult to

determine:

it

continues the

author's

move

from

space opera to

crossover








14

SCIENCE ICTION

TUDIES,

VOLUME 3

(2006)

technothriller.

It

is a breathlessand kinetic low

entertainment,

but

one

studded

with

contemplative

passages

that

resonate

with Conrad's Heart

of

Darkness

(1902)

and Wells's Island

of

Doctor Moreau

(1896),

and it contains the

exorbitantviolence of the John Webster

revenge

tragedy

from which it takes

its

name.

McAuley

also slices

through

the

distinctionbetween hard and

soft

sf.

White

Devils

is

undoubtedly

hard sf: it is the kind of book

thatwants to

teach

the

reader

the

distinction between mitochondrialand

genomic

DNA,

and

its

imaginarysciences are

extrapolated

rom

currentbiotech research. Yet

it is

also

fascinated

with

subjectivity

and

traumatic

breaches

of

human

dentity,

the

kind

of

material long identified with soft sf. The

hybridization

of

these traditions

refuses to continue a

long

factional war-but

refuses,

in

Latourian

terms,

precisely because of theproductionof newhybrids hatrequireareconfiguration

of the

subject/object

or

human/nonhuman ivide.

WhiteDevils

explicitly

thematizeshow Science has

given

way

to an era

of

Research, presenting

a

messy

and confused world where the

laboratory

is

inextricably mixed with

politics,

aid

agencies,

and

open-source

late-stage

capitalism

(141).

The

pure

scientist

is

described

as

a relict

species....

You

exist in

a

marginal

environment.

Always you

must

struggle

for

funds,

scraps

of

endowments,

sponsorship,

and

always

you

must work

harder or

less

and ess....

The

nineteenth-century ulture of

science's Golden

Age

...

was

destroyed

(314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for heavily capitalized illicit

research,

released from

any regulationor

ethics.

It

has resulted n

the prolifera-

tion

of

hybrid

objects and new actants

hat cannot

easily be sorted

according

to

the

modem

settlement.

The

pandemic

of

the

plastic

disease,

for

example,

results from

gene

manipulation,so that

insects transport

material originally

designed

to make

hydrocarbons

n

plants:

in

the

last

stages

of

the

disease,

the

victims are turned nto

grotesque

iving statues,

paralysedbyhard, knotty

strings

and

lumps

of

polymer under

their skin

and

muscles

(24). The

inability to

distinguish

human

and nonhuman s

what drives the

thriller

plot,

these

terms

regularly and feverishly inverting. Are the white devils human or genetic

reconstructions

of pre-human

hominids? What

happens when

researchers

actively

seek to dethrone

human

priority,

cloning

extinctrivals?

One

protagonist

tracking

down

the white devil

atrocities

s

discovered to be less

human than

thought,

and the

terrain of

the

Democratic

Republic of

Congo is full

of

monstrosities.

Yet the

monstersat the

core of

the tale prove

more

humanthan

some

of their

pursuers.

In

this, there is

another

revision of the

sensibility that

sustained Conrad or

Wells: in

a world

of

hybrids, there can

be no

monsters.

Although

Istvan

Csicsery-Ronayhas

argued or a

postmodem

grotesque, where

anomalous deviations ... are norms (72), it may be that the horror of

transgression hat

has

powered

the Gothic and

the

Grotesquewould

have to be

wholly

reconceived once the

modem

obsession with

sorting,

categorizing, and

purifying

has been

displaced.

Another set of

texts that

virtually

enact Latour's

nsistence

on networksand

tangled

objects

is Kim

Stanley

Robinson's

ongoing

series aboutthe

science and

politics

of

global

warming, which so far

includesForty

Signs of

Rain(2004) and

Fifty Degrees

Below

(2005). Latour

has used

global warming

as an

instance








BRUNOLATOUR'S CIENTIFICTION

15

where

matters f concern

supersede

matters f fact. Robinson'sbooks

stage

the

disputes

over evidence of climate

change

and

the

attempts

of scientific

researchers, political advisors,

laboratory

workers, funding

bureaucrats,

senators,

mathematic

modelers,displaced

Tibetans,

raumatized

ociobiologists,

and others

to persuade

a

Republicangovernment

o

acknowledge

he crisis

in the

midst of extreme

weather

events. What

heterogeneous

alliance

can

be

forged

against

the

hegemonic

bloc

of

rapacious

capital?

The

strategy

of

forming

alliances and networks that cut across diverse and

heterogeneous

sites is

explicitly worked out

in

the

novels;

the

pleasingly

odd

central character

begins

as a reductive

sociobiologist,

but

develops

an

understanding

f

the

politics

of

science that values the need for

impure

connections, making diverse and

surprising inks. With work likethis from so-called hard f (onemightfurther

include

Gregory Benford

or

Greg Bear as

writers modeling

the associative

networks of science),

the modern

dispensation that sustained

the

distinction

between hard and

soft within the

genre may be

largelysuperseded,as the

social

and the

scientific find

themselves

continually imbricated.

Thinkingabout

their

work

throughLatourwould demand

his supersessionas a

redundant

dispensa-

tion

of the modern

constitution.

It

may

be, then, that

Latour'swork is useful

not only as yet

anothercritical

resource to

overlay onto fiction but

also as a

useful guide to articulating

he

hybridityof recent sf. It links sf into a networkof associationsthatregisters a

transformationof

scientific

authority

n

the

contemporaryworld, helping

to

explain

why

sf

has

become such a

vital node in

the

collective for thinking

through

our

contemporarymattersof

anxious

concern.

NOTES

1. For

law,

see La

Fabrique;

for

religion,

see

Jubiler; for

art, see

Latourand

Peter,

Iconoclash;

for

recent

commentary on

critique, see

Why

Has

Critique Run Out

of

Steam?

2.

Latour

trained

first

as an

anthropologist,

doing

fieldwork in

the

Ivory

Coast. He

has spokenabout the influence of Marc Auge on the attempt o create a symmetrical

anthropology -that

is, one that

does not

presume

superiority

of

West

over East

or

observer

over

observed, and

that can

employ

anthropological

method

reversibly

(see

Latour,

Un

Monde

Pluriel).

3. Work

from

the

Edinburgh

School

(now

long

dispersed)

includes

that of

Steven

Shapin

and

Simon

Schaffer.

Latour

has

translated a

number

of works

of

English

sociology and

history

of

science into

French, but

has

ongoing

methodological

disputes

with

a

number of

English

counterparts,most

recently

with

David

Bloor: see

Bloor's

Anti-Latour

and

Latour's

reply, For

David Bloor. A

helpful

starting

point is

Schaffer's lengthyreview of Latour'sPasteurisationof France.

4. John

Law

also

runs

he Actor

Network

Resource

website; see <

http://www.lancs.

ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm

.

5. In

fact,

this

borrows

heavily

from

Michel

Serres's

arguments

for a

multi-

temporality

hat

confounds

conventional

historiography:

An

object,

a

circumstance, s

polychronic,

multitemporal,

and reveals

a time

that is

gathered

together,

with

multiple

pleats

(Serres

and

Latour

60).

For

Serres,

this

is part

of

a

simultaneity of

widely

distributed

historical

resources

that

entirely refuse

any

of the

kinds of

ruptural

narrative








16

SCIENCEFICTION

STUDIES, VOLUME 33

(2006)

usually

associated with

postmodernism.

For more

conceptual

inks between

Serres

and

Latour,

see

Laura

Salisbury's

essay

in

this issue.

WORKS CITED

Bloor, David.

Anti-Latour.

Studies

in

the

History

and

Philosophy of

Science

30.1

(1999): 81-112.

Callon, Michel and

Bruno

Latour.

Unscrewing

he

Big

Leviathan:How

Actors

Macro-

Structure

Reality

and

How

Sociologists

Help

Them

to

Do So.

Advances in

Social

7Theorynd

Methodology:Toward

an

Integration

of

Micro-

and

Macro-Sociologies.

Ed. Karin

Knorr-Cetinaand

Aron Cicourel. London:

Routledge,

1981.

277-303.

Crease, Robertet al. Interviewwith BrunoLatour.

Chasing

Technoscience:

Matrixfor

Materiality.

Ed. Don Ihde

and Evan

Selinger.

Bloomington:

Indiana

UP,

2003. 15-

26.

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.,

Istvan. On

the

Grotesque

n

Science

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29.1

(March

2002): 71-99.

Elam, Mark.

Living

Dangerously

with

Bruno

Latour

in

a

Hybrid World.

Theory,

Cultureand

Society

16.4

(1999):

1-24.

Haraway, Donna J.

Cyborgs to

Companion Species:

Reconfiguring Kinship

in

Technoscience.

Chasing Technoscience:Matrix

or

Materiality.

Ed. Don

Ihde

and

Evan

Selinger.

Bloomington,

IndianaUP, 2003.

58-82.

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan

Meets_OncomouseTM:

Feminism and

Technoscience.

London:

Routledge, 1997.

Latour, Bruno. Aramis or the Love of Technology. 1993. Trans. Catherine Porter.

Cambridge,

MA: Harvard

UP,

1996.

. La

Fabriquedu droit: une

ethnographiedu

conseil d'etat. Paris: La

D6couverte,

2002.

. For David Bloor

...

And Beyond: A

Reply. Studies in the

History

and

Philosophy of Science 30.1

(1999).

113-29.

Jubiler ou les

Tourments

de la parole

religieuse. Paris: Seuil,

2002.

Un

Monde Pluriel Mais

Commun:

Entretiens

avec Francois

Ewald. Paris: Ed.

L'Aube, 2005.

. On

Recalling ANT.

Actor-Network

Theoryand After.

Ed. John

Law and John

Hassard. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1999.

15-25.

.

On

Using

ANT for

Studying Information

Systems: A

(Somewhat) Socratic

Dialogue.

The

Social Study of

Information

and

Communication

Technology. Ed.

Christanthi

Avgerou,

Claudio

Ciborra, and Frank

Land. Oxford:

Oxford UP,

2004.

62-76.

.

Pandora's

Hope:

Essays on the

Reality of

Science Studies.

Cambridge,

MA:

Harvard

UP, 1999.

.

The

Pasteurization

of France. 1984.

Trans.

Alan Sheridan

and John

Law.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard

UP, 1988.

. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. 1999. Trans.

Catherine

Porter.

Cambridge, Mass.:

HarvardUP,

2004.

.

Reassembling

the

Social: An

Introduction o

Actor-Network-Theory.

Oxford:

Oxford

UP,

2005.

. Science in

Action:

How

to

Follow Scientists

and

Engineers Through

Society.

Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard

UP, 1987.

.

War

ofthe

Worlds:

What

about

Peace? Trans.

Charlotte

Bigg. Chicago:

Prickly

Paradigm, 2002.








BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION

17

. We Have Never Been

Modern.

1991. Trans.

CatherinePorter.

Brighton, UK:

Harvester,

1993.

. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?From Mattersof Fact to Matters of

Concern. Critical

Inquiry

30

(Winter 2004):

225-48.

and Peter Weibel.

Iconoclash:

Beyond

the

Image

Wars n

Science, Religion

and

Art.

Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002.

and Steve Woolgar.

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f Scientific

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John. After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology.

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and

After.

Ed. John Law and John Hassard. Oxford:

Blackwell,

1999. 1-24.

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Cambridge:Polity, 2005.

McAuley, Paul. WhiteDevils. London: Simon and

Schuster,

2004.

Mieville, China. Iron Council. London:Macmillan,2004.

Nowotny,

Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons.

Re-ThinkingScience: Knowledge

and the

Public

in

an Age of

Uncertainty.

Oxford:

Polity,

2001.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs

of Rain. London:

HarperCollins,2004.

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HarperCollins,2005.

Robson,

Justina. Natural History. London: Macmillan, 2003.

Schaffer, Simon. The Eighteenth

Brumaireof Bruno Latour.

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and

Philosophy of Science

22.1

(1991). 174-92.

Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour.

Conversationson Science,

Culture,and Time. 1994.

Trans.

Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1995.

Shapin, Steven.

A

Social History of Truth:Civility and Science

in SeventeenthCentury

England. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1994.

Wolfe,

Gary K. Genre

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Fantastic.

Edging into the

Future: Science Fiction

and Contemporary Social

Transformation.Ed. Veronica

Hollinger and Joan Gordon. Pennsylvania: U of

PennsylvaniaP, 2002. 11-29.

ABSTRACT

This essay

introduces he

work

of

controversial

historianand

philosopherof science

and

technology, BrunoLatour.It suggeststhat his theories of hybridobjects, his analyses of

networks

thatcriss-cross

normally

discrete

categories of

science,

politics,

and

culture,

and his

displacement of

the

modern/postmodern

paradigm can

offer

productive

new

readingsof

science

fiction,

permitting

ritics to

rethink he

genre's

relation o

science

and

society.

Latour's own

scientifictions his

coinage)

are

examined

alongsideworks

by

sf

authorsChina

Mieville, Paul

McAuley, and Kim

Stanley

Robinson.

luckhurst - bruno latour

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