Ep. 230: Bruno Latour on Science, Culture, and Modernity (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 230 is something like, what is the relationship between science and politics? And we read we have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour from 1993. This is Mark Linsenmayer, a proud member of the Parliament of things in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:21 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, potentially pre modern, possibly anti modern, or maybe non modern in Austin, Texas.

0:28 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:30 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, hybridized in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Linda: This is Linda Ullman. I'm a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, and I am probably solidly a hybrid.

0:43 Mark: Did you take the online quiz?

0:44 Linda: Oh, yeah, that's right. It's like, you know, it was either the narcissist quiz or the hybrid quiz. And I decided to take the hybrid quiz.

0:51 Mark: Why, Linda, your voice sounds so familiar, but yet we don't recognize that last name.

0:54 Linda: Yes, the last time I was with you to discuss oppenheimer for episode 96, My Last Name was Walsh and it's Ullman now.

1:01 Mark: Well, this was a text or an author that you had suggested at the time when we were talking about the rhetoric of science advisors. And it has been often requested by fans of the continental stripe of philosophy. And this, I guess, is his most famous work, right?

1:18 Linda: It is. And I know that you have a lot of Latour fans at Pel, so I know they will be exc this episode.

1:23 Mark: All right, well, do we want to kind of go around in between the bunch of us, give a little introduction of what this book is about, what our background is on it, what we want to get out of today. Do you want to start, Linda?

1:33 Linda: This is probably one of the top three books I recommend to anyone ever. And also when people ask me about my intellectual formation, this is one of the books I mentioned. This is sort of when the veil was lifted from my eyes and I saw the truth. When I read this book, it really helped me see, I guess, both the hope and the pathology of the way that we relate, especially between science and the public, because that's what I study. I'm a rhetorician of science, so I study how science and scientists are represented in the public. And this book was really a threshold book for me in that way.

2:08 Mark: So we're doing this now just because we just did these social construction episodes and doing something on the science wars, since that was one of the issues brought up in hacking and the other folks, we Read in there seemed a good idea. It was a quite different style than I was expecting, but I guess in line with the sort of historians of science that Hacking talked a lot about in that book.

2:29 Linda: He's got a very special writing style, and I enjoy it a lot. It's very playful. He's influenced a lot by classical authors. When I've talked to him about it and asked him about his writing style, he said he likes to end every chapter with a little point, a little, like, pithy utterance. And so that's why you can find these little, like, mic drops at the end of every chapter. And that's part of his unique style as a philosopher and as an anthropologist.

2:52 Dylan: I had never read Latour. One of the things that had stayed with me over time is I studied political philosophy as an undergrad. I studied physics as an undergrad. And one of the things I was very interested in but never really did much about was this sort of. This feeling that there was something about the birth of modern liberal democracy and modern natural science as having something to do with one another, not just in time, but in their approach to solving problems. And like, in a naive way, I would say something like the voting mechanism that happens in science.

And so that's what was interesting to me to see to him. The way he characterizes Boyle versus Hobbes is in part that characterization that Boyle brings to the table. This idea that there is something like assent going on, but it's not, in a sense, that's born out of an old form of authority. It's a kind of combination. It's a hybrid of something like that having to do with expertise and a group of people looking at the same thing and coming to the same conclusion or trying to convince each other of that. So that part I found very interesting and rich in a way that I hadn't thought about it.

It made me want to go read Shapin's book.

4:03 Linda: It's a great book. Yeah, you'll love it.

4:06 Mark: Right. Just that part of what Latour is doing is describing the books of some other people, just like Hacking did. So this Shapin book was the specific example of Thomas Hobbes versus Robert Boyle. Came out of that. Latour does his own thing with it, you know, wants a different conclusion than the book he's describing.

4:22 Seth: So as I age and I inhabit the character of the guy who tells the kids to get off his lawn. Those kids are Enlightenment thinkers. I'm becoming more and more anti Enlightenment as I get older, and I'm very hostile now to the idea of reason as an instrument of liberation. So any formulation that I can find, anything that articulates the violence that's inherent in subjectivity and the creation of the world as an epistemological, like, play field for objects to be discovered and thematized, and all that stuff gets me excited. And I really, really like this.

He gave me a new language for talking about why fascism exists, why crazy, weird religious sects in America exist, how you can essentially maintaining dichotomies or contradictory notions in your head and just being proud of it. It's prescient in the way that it describes the political landscape right now. And there are chapters, there are parts of it that are hilarious, especially when he starts talking about the postmoderns.

5:23 Linda: Yeah, he goes easy on him in this book Mark and I were just talking about. It's a different book, Pasteurization of France, where he really. He really goes in on him in that book. But he plays nice in this one.

5:34 Seth: He has fun with Habermas. Yeah, Habermas is not a jokey kind of guy, so it's hard to have fun with him. Anyway, I truly enjoyed it.

5:41 Mark: So to clarify, this is broken up into four books. It's a long, single essay, about 150 pages, and we really only focused on the first two sections. So the first one is pretty quick, called Crisis, describing what he thinks we're responding to. And the second one, Constitution. So that's the one that really has the bulk of his historical analysis, this Boyle vs. Hobbes, and what he thinks modernity is and why, as the title says, we have never been modern. And then we read a little bit into Revolution, what's kind of his solution to getting out of this, and then skipped to the end to a little bit of section 5 redistribution, to say, are we supposed to get rid of modernity?

What does he want to retain? So we'll have a little sense of what he wants to get out of this, but I think we're going to be in much better shape just to say how he characterizes what modernity is. Wes, did you have any initial reactions to this? I know you.

6:34 Wes: No, I'm going to pass.

6:35 Mark: Okay, we'll hear later. All right, well, let's get into it. What is the problem? What is this crisis here?

6:43 Linda: The best way to look at it is that we're ignoring non humans, and we're really ignoring hybrids, which are combinations of humans and non humans, combinations of nature and culture. But really we're not giving non humans a place at the table, a stake in Our democracy. And this is really the problem. This is the problem that's going to come to bother Latour a lot more in the next couple of decades is he confronts climate change. Climate change is one of these emergent, wicked problems that blows our coping mechanisms out of the water. And he starts out with the ozone hole right in this book.

So climate change is the thing that makes it completely apparent to us that we are no longer able to push apart nature and culture and keep them apart, purify these two things from each other. So the problem is that we have been not giving suffrage to a set of beings on the planet that are entirely consequential for all of our thriving and flourishing. And Latour is trying to solve that problem. But to solve that problem, he has to get back to the roots of how the problem was created. And that's when he gets into the modern constitution.

7:47 Mark: So I guess just putting this in terms of the story of social construction, right, the modern constitution is the social construction, or at least a part of the intellectual landscape that he thinks characterizes modernity.

7:57 Seth: Right.

7:58 Mark: Which is why we have an ethics and a way of dividing up science from politics that would lead us to, I guess, on his analysis, ignore environmental issues. And there are lots of other problems with it.

8:09 Dylan: I mean, his diagnosis of this purification direction on one side and the. What's the word he uses?

8:17 Linda: He calls it either mediation or translation. He calls it sort of interchangeably. Yeah.

8:22 Dylan: That he sees there being these two poles and in. Let's call it modern thought. And he shifts what he means by this because he characterizes it and says, of course, it's not strictly speaking exactly that way. It's not as clean as the way I'm talking about it. But he sees there being sort of related errors going on both sides that is captured. The failure is most clear in the case of these called hybrid things, these things that aren't simply purifiable into something objective completely outside of ourselves or something that is wholly cultural, things that are combinations of culture and human beings. Combinations of culture and nature.

9:02 Mark: Yeah, that was a weird concept, this hybrid that I don't even feel like I understood until we got to section three deep into it. Even though he starts off right at the beginning, supposedly giving examples of these hybrids. But the hybrids are like science invents something and that has social effects. So therefore, in talking about it, in writing a news story about it, you're talking both about the science and you're talking about the politics. Why would that possibly raise sort of ontological difficulties like, of course, there's the science, and science is pursuing something objective, and then you build something with the science and it's a machine. And that has political effects. And so you have to refer to it when you're talking about politics. But that sort of hybridization, that doesn't strike me as pointing out a crisis in modernity.

9:48 Wes: That's right. The book starts with him talking about newspaper stories that mix up biology and society. So a story that talks about the hole in the ozone layer might talk about the science of that and then the politics of that. And yeah, as Mark said, that does not, on the face of it, create any actual hybrids in the sense of objects that are hybrids. It's difficult to see what the issue is there. I think later on we will get the idea that it's vague. I think it's not put very precisely, but we'll get a cluster of related ideas. And one is that social entities are profoundly altered by their material conditions.

So when we talk about society, we have to talk about objects, including technology. If we talk about institution, like a car manufacturer, we have to talk specifically about the science of pistons, for instance. Another is that we can't understand human subjects without understanding underlying material. Is my word, by the way, just to clarify underlying material conditions. So we have to talk about neuroscience, to talk about psychology. And the third and more controversial idea is that we can't understand science. Or at least this to me is implied, that in understanding science we're required to do a sociological analysis of its practices, its communities, and of the objects involved in doing science, like instruments and so on and so forth.

Ultimately, there's a bunch of different claims there, and some of them, I think, are much more controversial than others and much more defensible than others.

11:22 Linda: I think the crux of, and I completely agree with you, that doesn't become clear until later, I think, who can actually help us see how profound what Boyle is arguing, and therefore really what the science studies folks from Edinburgh are arguing, and therefore what Latour is arguing is we go back to Hobbes, because Hobbes had it right when he was freaked out by what Boyle was suggesting with the new experimental paradigm. And the best summary of that for me is on page 29 in my edition, section 2.8. Latour writes, in his writing and his correspondence, Boyle simultaneously redesigns scientific rhetoric, theology, scientific politics, and the hermeneutics of facts.

Together they describe how God must rule, how the new king of England must legislate, how the spirits or the angels should act, what the properties of matter are how nature is to be interrogated, what the boundaries of scientific or political discussion may be, how to keep the lower orders on a tight rein, what the rights and duties of women are, what is to be expected of mathematics. What Hobbes was recognizing is that if for something to be true it needed to pass through the laboratory, then for Hobbes this is a profoundly undemocratic thing that's being suggested and it's a profoundly heretical and politically subversive thing.

So for something to count as civic truth or social truth, for it to be admitted as a fact of life, if it has to pass through the test of the laboratory and the Royal Society, this is what profoundly disturbs Hobbes. That is the most disturbing position of Boyle. It's an early form of social constructionism, but it's laboratory social constructivism. So Boyle is saying we don't know anything is true unless we can test it and prove it to be true in our labs. And this does actually change everything. It changes everything about politics, it changes everything about religion, it changes everything about everything.

And so that's really the disturbing crux of what is being suggested here.

13:12 Dylan: So I understand why Hobbes would be upset about it because it's heretical. What I don't get is the form of it being non democratic. There's clearly a way in which it's non democratic in that it's not everybody having an equal vote on it, for instance. Right. It's oligarchic in a way. Right. It's that you have people who are knowledgeable and we'll put in brackets what we mean by that. They're admitted as being legitimate for helping make that decision. Right. But what this clearly becomes is basically it becomes peer review. It becomes the way in which science works.

I haven't read Shapin's book, but just even in a couple paragraphs, the way it's described, you can just see the way science becomes this entity in which it's a mechanism of practices that it's held to be how science gets to something being true. And it's not that any given claim within that process is going to be true, it's that eventually it will be. We're working on Descartes rules for the regulation of the mind and working up to method. So in that way it's the same kind of thing. You're not guaranteed to get the right answer, but it's this process that is going to get you there and within

14:23 Linda: the communities of science. I think that's 100% true. I think Hobbes is looking at it from a position outside of the communities that do science. So from his perspective, what he was really worried about is in Parliament you discuss what to do, what ought to be the case about facts on the ground, right? So you have some system of going out and collecting facts on the ground. Ah, the French are invading, right, because the French are always invading. And so you collect those facts and then in Parliament you decide what ought to be done about them.

And what Hobbes is concerned about is that when the facts come in, they have already been determined by a method that is elite and that most people don't have access to that. You need specialized equipment that, specialized training to have access to that, to even be able to sense what that fact is. And so by the time the facts are even admitted to discourse, they've already been settled in a process that, to Hobbes is undemocratic because it can only be, like you said, oligarchic. In a way. We could say we would be more comfortable probably with the word technocratic.

But those facts have been established by a process that is not accessible to the vast majority of people who do have a vote in Parliament.

15:27 Dylan: So this makes me want to read Shapin's book, because these kinds of details matter, I think, in understanding this, because to me, the thing that Hobbes is going to obviously object to is the notion that it's heretical and that something could, let's call it, speak truth to power. And so that there's a way of deciding these things. So the lever that someone like Boyle is going to want to have. And again, I don't know what Boyle's exact argument is, but it's that you're focused on something that even though you have a kind of vote going on and even though it's by people who are knowledgeable, part of that standard is that anybody can do it, that it's plain before people, that there's a path to articulating why this is a fact, and that it's repeatable and that it can be done here and it can be done in Glasgow and it can be done in Edinburgh and it can be done in Peoria.

That's all part of the deal and that's part of what makes it more powerful. And to me, it's exactly that kind of thing that distributes the power so that somebody that's not in the hallowed halls of justice and who's not an anointed by God and a king can come and say, well, you're wrong. That's what the power is to me. And I could see why Hobbes would be upset about that.

16:36 Linda: Yeah. And that's a later form of science. So the kind of science that Robert Boyle is doing is happening among extraordinarily wealthy men who can afford this equipment in private meetings. And they're very explicit about how not just anyone can do what they do. Not just with the education. Okay. But disturbingly, they say that the breeding of a gentleman makes him more sensitive, less attached to worldly concerns, more devout, more Christian, and more available to God, telling him through the acts of creation, how the laws of nature work. So Boyle's argument to Hobbes is really like, look, this isn't heretical.

We're the best Christians you've ever seen. We're trying to figure out to how. How God did everything so we can give those rules to the state and let them operationalize them, let them make their own acts of creation. So that was his argument to Hobbes is like, we're the Christians Christian here. But for us, looking back at this, there's a very disturbing element of elitism here where there was explicit arguments made that only gentlemen were sensitive enough instruments to capture these natural phenomena.

17:39 Mark: So we should get clear then on Hobbes position according to the text that Latour is describing as well. Because, you know, anybody that has studied any Hobbes in philosophy does not associate him necessarily with democracy. And the fact that we were saying that Hobbes, by setting up the social contract, was prefiguring Locke, was prefiguring a lot of the stuff, like we got some flack about that on our original Hobbes episode way back. But the way that it's being described here is that yes, the Leviathan is a tyrant, but because of the social contract, the Leviathan represents us.

Right. We all willingly, whether we know it or not, have, through the social contract, to save ourselves from perpetual war, put our judgment in the hands of a single representative figure. So even though it's not democratic exactly, it's supposedly representative. And so by saying it's just the state, this thing that fundamentally we all created and it represents us. And that's what's going to determine what truth really about anything is certainly about theological matters, about whatever that.

18:42 Linda: It's.

18:43 Mark: You can't then refer to some external religious authority. Right. This is what gave us hundreds of years of religious wars. Is people referring to external religious. No, it's just the state is the source of that. And there's no further recourse beyond that. And that's supposed to be paradoxically more democratic, more representative than this thing that Boyle is presenting, which is referring to an external standard which we are not in the position to second guess. And the scientists could disagree amongst themselves. Like we could potentially have the same sort of chaos that we had with competing religions, with competing scientific claims.

19:20 Seth: I feel like it muddies the waters a little bit to talk about the Leviathan, the absolute monarch representing the individuals, because that suggests democracy, like a representative democracy. That's not really what we're talking about here. The mechanism of the social contract makes it such that everybody explicitly or implicitly is entering into an agreement. There's consensus, there's choice, there's consensus and participation. The body politic is literally every single individual person brought together. And the ultimate goal is by unifying the will of the people in the form of the Leviathan will eliminate religious wars and strife and so forth.

And the threat that Boyle represents to Hobbes is not anti democratic or elitist so much as it's the possibility that there can be a referral to authority or an appeal to authority that is outside of this structure of the body politic. If what we do is every single human subject comes together and we agree to take the power that we have inherently and imbue the monarch or the Leviathan with that power so that he or she can rule effectively and eliminate, then the arbiter of knowledge and truth is the Leviathan. If there's a possibility to appeal to something outside of that structure, then it's a threat to the entire structure itself.

20:48 Linda: Yeah, so we shouldn't probably be using the word undemocratic. Right. We should probably be saying private. The problem there's a private space outside of the public space, outside of the body public where these experiments are going on and where truth is being manufactured.

21:03 Seth: Well, I think I was just trying to guard against using the term democratic just because I think that suggests other things. But really what Latour is going to say is that and this brings in the notion of hybrid that, you know, you kicked off the conversation with is the Boyle approach is to partition and make a strong line between subjectivity and objectivity and then to create a space for objects to speak in a certain way or to have authority. And in the Hobbesian schema, nature or objects can't be something to which you can appeal for truth that's going to transcend the social order that's constructed.

I was trying to drive more towards that to get to this distinction that he Makes between polarization, you know, on the top and hybridization underneath. But essentially the sharp distinction between subject and object that he's making the point that Boyle is driving us towards an epistemological model of knowledge that renders the object in one way that it can't possibly exist inside of the Hobbesian scheme because you can't have an objective nature that's distinct and separate from society in the Hobbesian model because it provides a basis for authority that would undermine the entire thing.

22:17 Mark: So there's some very weird stuff that is said about this then in section 2.5, the testimony of non humans. Right. When you introduced that, Linda, it sounded like you were talking about, you know, we need to be environmentally friendly, we need to in our ethics, consider animal rights, things like that. But here, when he's talking about what the testimony of non humans are, it's scientific apparatus. So on page 24, second paragraph. If science is based not on ideas but on a practice, if it is located not outside but inside the transparent chamber of the air pump, and if it takes place within the private space of the experimental community, then how does it reach everywhere?

How does it become universal as Boyle's laws or as Newton's laws? The answer it is it has never become universal, not at least in the epistemologist's terms. Its network is extended and stabilized. You know, it's not humans, as in Hobbes take on the public space they're forming. What scientific truth would be. I don't know if that's really what Hobbes thought. That seems like a pretty bizarre thing to claim or to be arguing against. No, it's the testimony of non humans of the experimental apparatus. That's what actually is determining truth. We've already said that that's outside the body politic.

That's understandable. But because it's taking place in the private space of the experimental community, then it does not reach everywhere. Right. This is exactly the opposite of what Dylan said, that no, you could actually this experiment in any lab in the country or in the world, and it would give you the same answer. That is why it becomes universal as Boyle's laws, Newton laws. But right here Latour is saying, no, it never becomes universal. The whole epistemological idea of universal scientific laws is undermined by the very methods of science.

And this just seems bizarre to me. I don't understand why he's claiming this.

24:02 Seth: Maybe I would reformulate. And I'm so excited to have Dylan talk about the theories of the vacuum versus ether or whatever it is and get us up to speed on that. But it's not that it can be performed anywhere in the world with anybody who's got the right apparatus. It's that it has to be. The only way this becomes universal is that if people in different places actually set up the mechanism, set up the apparatus and perform the experiment, that's what validates it. That's what creates the universality. It's not a universal law that then makes possible these things. It's that it only becomes universal through the actual instantiation of doing the experiment over and over again and having it validated by the experts. Right. That's what Latour, I think, is saying.

24:45 Dylan: I wasn't sure how to take this notion of the testimony of non humans when I read it. Maybe because I'm not taking it as on the face, as serious as Mark is taking it. It had to be analogical. What does it mean to have the air pump giving testimony? There's an air pump being interpreted and through that contextual interpretation, there's something that is being gleaned from that. And it may be different at different times. And the experiments might result in different kinds of conclusions for different people based upon the different assumptions that they bring to bear on it.

At best, it would be the kind of testimony that someone who is a hardcore purification scientist would be saying, which is the experiments speak for themselves. I don't see how you take that as being anything but analogical to the notion of trying to talk about how plain it is, that it's like clear and distinct. The way Descartes would say when you say an experiment speaks for itself when he says the testimony of non humans. So I'm brought back because what Linda was saying earlier and the way Mark was characterizing it is that saying that Latour really means that there's something like that.

I call the testimony of the air pump. I guess I don't know what that means.

25:56 Linda: So he's being pretty literal here. There's a really great series of essays that Robert Boyle writes called Occasional Reflections. He talks about himself as when he's in his lab. He says mossy and decomposed bodies, rocks, storms, pieces of soil. They speak to him. He's almost like a medium, which is not ironic for the way Latour talks about it. But Boyle is a medium through which these non human beings speak. And air pump is an apparatus that he has created, like a Ouija board, essentially, to listen to them, to listen to them tell him about their composition, what they do, what they want Now Boyle was a good Christian, so of course he's going to say, you know, naturally these voices are all from God, right?

These are all the voices of angels. But he is being very literal about making nature speak with these apparatus. So it's like having a microphone or a Ouija board or some instrument that makes these talk. And Latour will follow right in the wheelhouse there with him. Latour spends a lot of time in his other writings talking about non humans and how they can speak and how they speak through us and they speak through instruments.

26:58 Mark: And so is the idea then of the hybrids playing a part in the political process is that when we make policy it's not just, hopefully that everybody just has their opinion and they're all equally unfounded. And we chime in, it's no that the scientists are channeling this other force that's at play, which is sort of nature itself speaking and saying, actually your climate science policy should be this way in reaction to the actual facts of things. And so it's just an analogical way of saying that pure democracy, pure Hobbesian humans, unguided by anything external, come up with the body politic, come up with the decisions of how we're going to run our government, is not really accurate that as we treat these non human actors, these scientific facts that have been discovered and then are, you know, as sources of decision making, as sources of power, essentially. Does that seem accurate?

27:55 Linda: Yeah, I think so. That's pretty fair. The modern constitution depends on hybrids. It rests on hybrids. That's the diagram he gives, right? Shows them as the substrate or the bedrock of the modern constitution. But yet we, we refuse to acknowledge their partition and the fact that our entire modern way of life and modern society is built on the backs of hybrids and we refuse to talk about and we refuse to acknowledge them.

28:15 Dylan: This is interesting because this way of talking about it is making me much, much less excited about it, unfortunately. The reason is this is that the description of the poles of the conversation seems to be very, the translation and purification that the nature is outside of us versus everything is internal and interpreted. Those kinds of things seem really spot on into sort of poles of the way in which the interpretation of politics and science work. His criticism of postmodernism is interesting in this way. And there's this kind of fetishizing of what is outside of us and how can we know that it is and understanding the truth from there, or everything comes from within us and everything is determined by ourselves and we get tied up in knots in either way.

I Definitely have been reading hybrid as referring to ideas, not as to entities that speak, except in an analogical way. But again, the way we're talking about this now is that hybrids are ontological objects, but not in the sense of ideas, but in the sense of they're

29:24 Mark: hybrids between ideas and things, right?

29:27 Linda: Isn't that they are ontological, they are hybrids. They include ideas. They are not restricted to ideas, but they do include them. So they can be physical and they can be ideational. The most kind of perspicuous example of what Latour is talking about, I think, can be found in electricity. If you look at electricity, basically it started with a problem of purification, right? We were too enmeshed with cold and dark. We did not like these aspects of nature as our culture was developing. It required more hours of daylight and it required us to be warm so we could sit and work on the kind of more intellectual, more technological things that we wanted to work on as a culture.

We sought to purify the darkness and the cold from the activities of our culture. So we created electricity, right? So our first pass. This is a hybrid, though, because you have to burn coal to get electricity. It's not just purely a cultural phenomenon. We placed the infrastructure, we burnt coal. Well, then we created a hybrid, which is the coal plant, and we created another hybrid, which is pollution, or it's an admixture of nature and culture. Pollution is not just purely a natural object. It is a human cultural reaction to a natural thing.

Particles of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the air that we breathe. We don't like breathing those things. We call it pollution, right? So this is pollution as a hybrid. So now we've created a hybrid. So like, oh, crap, now we have to purify this hybrid out of our air. We want this out of our air. We don't want this as part of our culture. So we build hydroelectric dams, right? And that gets rid of the coal burning, and now the salmon can't get out. So we create fish ladders. And so it just goes. It goes, you know, coal plant, dam, fish ladder.

And, you know, it just keeps going and going. So the harder we try to purify, this is the central irony of the modern constitution. The harder we try to purify to keep nature and culture apart, the more hybrids we proliferate, ironically. And you could do the same exercise with pesticides or anything else that you wanted. I just think that electricity works nicely.

31:20 Mark: That was interesting that you were talking there about purifying specific things. Like, I was thinking Purification, the way he generally uses it here is just what the scientists following Boyle, following Bacon are insisting on is dividing the political from the scientific right, dividing the world in itself from our ideas about the world. That's the purification that they're engaged in. And you do that as a matter of science by trying to get rid of human bias by doing more experiments. So it's just a description, the word purification description of the scientists trying to get at objective truth. Is that accurate?

31:59 Linda: Yeah, that's one form of it. But it's also. It can be a material process as well, just like Dylan's question. Hybrids can be physical and they can be ideational. And what you're talking about is an ideational part of that process. And I was talking about a physical part of that process.

32:11 Mark: Just don't see how making the term cover both clarifies things. I'm just finding this whole set of vocabulary very bizarre.

32:19 Linda: Well, the modern Constitution doesn't just govern philosophy, Right. It governs our way of life. So you're trying to purify, you're trying to purify philosophy from material conditions and economics. Right? And Latour is saying it's all mixed together. That's the whole point with his newspaper articles, right? That chlorofluorocarbons and politicians and protesters and gene banks and corn, they're all mixed together.

32:43 Seth: I'm intrigued by the electricity example because I was thinking of other things when, you know, I was thinking about the example of. He talks about the whole ozone layer. But you can talk about global warming right now or any kind of like global ecological situation, disaster or whatever you want to call it, where if you try to analyze it from this perspective of science and say these are the measurements, these are the facts, whatever, there's no way to have any kind of a plan of response or reaction to it that's not ultimately social because the Earth may be the earth and we may think of the Earth as nature, but it's broken up into these plots of nationalities that have laws.

In that sense, I thought of the hybrid as there's no way to approach a transnational problem in a scientifically objective way. And that's the same as saying there's no way to talk or think about things purely objectively, without any kind of subjective perspective, when in fact the discussion itself about any of these things is being held from the context of subjectivity inside of a social order.

33:48 Dylan: For me, I'm getting tripped up on some of the language and how to understand an entity as a hybrid. The Way in which I would sort of think about it. Let's take something that seems contextual, like climate change or what our climate is and how it affects us is that decisions on the values. The value of this is a good climate or a bad climate, or we should do anything about it, or we shouldn't do anything about the effects of human beings on the climate. Those are all values judgments based upon what we want to have, how we expect it to be affecting us.

Right. The climate, just like the earth is just going to keep doing what it's doing. And even if we effects on it, it's going to be whatever they are. The question of whether how we ought to act about in response to that has to do with our value judgments about where we want to end and economics and balancing complicated effects of human beings. And then. And part of that becomes a discussion about, well, what's really the truth about it? Like, is this really having to do with human beings affecting the climate? Because the reason that you're doing that is you want to undermine whether or not we're culpable for it and stuff like that.

I agree that that space of what a Latour, I guess would call a hybrid has a kind of complex mixing of context and science and politics and culture in it. That's undoubtedly true. And I think that science and politics have a hard time talking about both of those things by themselves. And that's the part that I was getting out of Latour trying to get at is that there's something about politics and about sort of culture and something about science that has a hard time grappling with these things that are in between. And maybe that's all I need to sort of understand to call it a hybrid.

35:38 Wes: Part of what's. I think the confusion is something that you know from our original social construction episode. Both Mallon and Hacking warned us about many of the ambiguities of this term social construction, which is at work. Even though he's not using the phrase all over the place, he uses a little bit. But it's at work in all of this. And those ambiguities include saying something is socially constructed in the sense that we construct the different concepts by which we think about something. And then the more radical claim that an object itself is constructed, like money, for instance, by virtue of collective intention, or that particular subjects in a society are constructed by virtue of the fact that they will respond to the knowledge of others, to the gaze of others, however you want to put it to designations from others about their roles.

They can internalize those and be affected by those. So the female refugee, for instance, is not just a natural thing. It's something that's socially constructed on an account by virtue of the fact that we have ideas about that and people who are in that position, there's a whole matrix of other conditions that will determine how people will reinforce a certain kind of behavior and so create that, effectively create that role. In this context, we're talking about the social construction of scientific facts, which I think is a complete dead end.

Unfortunately, it's a dead end because basically, to get to the point where you could make that claim, you really do have to take a relativist route and deny that there's a mind independent element to reality. So if we're thinking about hybrids, are we thinking about the fact that we can think about the political effects of technology, for instance, or that we might look at natural objects by way of certain social and political concepts? Are we saying that there are actual hybrid objects in which the political and the natural actually combine?

And I think the latter claim, again, is really hard to defend. And when I told you guys this book bothered me, what bothers me is the failure to make that distinction throughout the book. And so you can get very poetic and you can sound very radical, but they're two very, very different claims. One of them is rather commonplace. This idea that our concepts, that their interactions with the political and the social, and that inevitably we look at things through such concepts. Then there's the more radical claim, that more ontological claim about the hybridity of.

38:12 Dylan: I like the way you articulated that distinction, Wes. What I'm wondering is, what do you get out of the ontological claim that you don't get without it? I mean, like I said when I was reading this, it's just, I guess, my naivete or my own sort of context. But I'm perfectly comfortable with talking about how an electron feels, right? But I don't believe that an electron feels anything. They want to be right up next to that proton. I'm totally cool with that. And I'm totally cool with all kinds of analogical forms of talking about intentions amongst and laws of science and stuff like that. What I'm wondering is what you get out of being really explicit about that ontological claim and sticking by it. What does it get you?

38:59 Mark: I'd like us to, by the end of this first half, be able to say what the constitution amounts to, what a constitution is. And I think talking about ontology in this way does highlight the move that he's making. Because I feel like when we were saying that a hybrid is actually something ontological, that it is, you know, and it plays a role in the body politic. And we're saying, oh, is that literal? Is that merely rhetorical? Well, it has to do with something like the social ontology, which we ran into that in our Social Construction of Race episode, that yes, these are just ideas of blackness or whatever, but because they play a role in people's lives, they are real.

And so that's what Latour wants to talk about when he talks about ontology. He is always talking about social ontology. And so within the social ontology you have. So we also saw this in Peter Berger where Berger says, yeah, if you analyze the beliefs like of a primitive person. And this is Latour also, you know, is drawing on the whole problem with this book. You know, what we're trying to do here is apply anthropology to ourselves, that we were never able to do that. But when we apply it to a primitive society, we have no problem lumping together all their beliefs about all the different stuff.

We have their beliefs about purely social things, the social classes within the system. And we have their beliefs about religion, we have their beliefs about the objective world. And so you could say, here's the world of, you know, this Amazonian civilization and you could describe both the social aspects and the so called natural aspects. And those are all part of their ontology. You know, it's very real to them that people have different castes and some are anointed by God and you could talk in that. And I think what Latour is saying is that this whole modern constitution makes us think that we have transcended that, that there's our social ontology and then there is real ontology, there's natural ontology, there's what science is actually discovering.

But Latour just wants to point out that all of this stuff, the scientific methodology that we've come up with is just kind of myth making on the same plane. You know, it's a little more sophisticated, but it's not fundamentally different in kind. Right. We as moderns, we think we've fundamentally broken from the superstitious past. And he thinks, no, these are just different models. You know, ours might have great advantages to them. They're not just, oh, it's pure relativism. Every civilization's view of everything is the same. There's definitely might be advantages.

And he thinks one of the advantages of this purification of the scientific from the political is that it's enabled us to help have technology that has improved our lives so much, right. It creates these. What then he calls these hybrids. So that is the strong claim that the social ontology really is the only ontology that we have access to. So that's just a different way of stating what I think Wes just said, which is that he doesn't distinguish between our general ideas of the world and the world in itself.

41:51 Linda: He does, just not very clearly in this book. He's pretty famous for having issued essentially an apologia about 15 years after this book was written, saying that he never intended it, but he understood that he had been taken to be a strong social constructivist and that he lamented the fact that his work had been used to support strong social construction or even a postmodern devalidation or denial of reality. He is definitely a realist philosopher. He believes in a reality that is. He likes the word resistant. He believes in a reality that's real and it's resistant and it is not able to be completely constituted by social forces in this book.

Probably the clearest articulation you can get of that, and I 100% agree with Wes, that is not really clearly articulated in this book. But the closest we can get is in his discussion of quasi objects. So remember, he says we're not going to be naturalists and say it's all out there and we're not going to be social, strong social constructivists and say it's all in society. So he says if we're going to be non modern, if we're going to just fess up and be non modern, we need to embrace this idea of quasi objects, which are real, but they are also socially constructed.

So the place he talks about that is on page 55, right at the bottom of section 3.2. Quasi objects are in between and below the two poles, the two poles of nature and culture that we were just talking about. Right at the very place around which dualism and dialectics have turned endless without being able to come to terms with them. Quasi objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the hard parts of nature. But they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full fledged society. On the other hand, they are much more real, non human and objective than those shapeless screens on which society, for unknown reasons, needed to be projected.

And this is the key sentence. This next, by trying the impossible task. Notice, he says, it's impossible by trying the impossible task of providing social explanations for hard scientific facts. This is what Wes was talking about after generations of social scientists had tried either to denounce soft facts or to use the hard sort of sciences uncritically. Science studies have forced everyone to rethink anew the role of objects in the construction of collectives, thus challenging philosophy. So that's probably the closest you're gonna get to a clear statement of the fact that he doesn't see himself as a strong social constructivist.

His goal is mostly to try to design, disrupt the implicit functioning, the invisible functioning of the modern constitution, and to call attention to it and to call attention to the hybrids that have been left out of the calculation. And this is what he thinks science studies has accomplished. But notice he explicitly says that he does not feel that science studies or any social science has actually accomplished making hard scientific facts be entirely a social construction. He argues explicitly against that.