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On Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993) with guest Lynda Olman.
What's the "modern" ideology of science, and is there something we should critique about it? Latour wants us to think about science not abstractly through the eternal truths it supposedly discovers, but through the concrete practices of scientists. This means acknowledging the phenomenology of science: It may well be that there's a totally objective, human-independent world that scientists are trying to get at, but their actual products are a mixture of nature and culture, or what Latour calls a "hybrid."
In talking about hybrids, Latour is referring to both the ideas that science comes up with (like the idea of a quark, a particular extrapolation from some data involving particle colliders and things; Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks tells a long story about the contingent historical circumstances that caused scientists to develop that particular conception) and technological objects that science develops, like computers, whose political component is partly a matter of how it changes our lives.
Latour describes "modernity" as an era characterized by a Constitution, which is conceptually a thing like Hobbes's social contract. It's a set of interlocking ideas that we've implicitly agreed to insofar as we're still enacting modernity, and as the title of this book indicates, he thinks we've never really wholly bought into this Constitution.
The Constitution primarily involves a strict separation of the scientific from the political. Science is objective; it's about us discovering things in the mind-independent world, and while yes, scientists have biases, these can be set aside so that we can get at truths that anyone who does the research should be able to agree on. On the other hand, the political is entirely our group creation: There are no divinely appointed monarchs, just structures that we've created, whether by centralized design or by a series of uncoordinated actions by individuals.
So what's wrong with these two claims? First, if nature really were something entirely separate from us, it would be alien and hostile; we couldn't do anything with it. No, science has always been not just about discovering objective truth, but about human utility. On the side of politics, if leadership were really a pure extension of our group will, then that would be an unrestricted, whimsical democracy. Instead, we posit some things like "rights" as if they were God-given. Both science and politics mix the objective and group-subjectivity.
Latour thinks that this Constitutional myth of modernity whereby science and politics are kept separate has on the one hand been very productive in allowing science to advance, and thus (ironically) technological hybrids to proliferate. By denying that hybrids exist, it actually encourages more hybrids. However, this willful ignorance has its downside: Scientists ignore the probable social effects of their creations, from the atom bomb to the emissions that have caused climate change to the throngs of people that we have saved with our medical but also removed the need for by automating away their jobs.
One parallel that comes up in the discussion: Mill's ideas on free speech are very much the product of modernity. He believed that we can separate out a forum for the free exchange of ideas (like the exchange between scientists) from different, overtly political speech acts like bullying and hate speech. A more sophisticated view (in Latour's view) would recognize that these can never be fully separated, and our codes of conduct need to recognize this (a la Fish in our free speech episode).
Despite all impressions, Latour insists that he's not a relativist, and he has nothing but contempt for post-modernism. His solution as outlined at the end of the book is a modified contract that keeps most of the benefits of modernism but does not insist on its myth-driven abstractions. We want technology, but we want careful scrutiny of its social effects. Extreme social constructionists set no bounds for the way our concepts could have been mapped out, but Latour acknowledges that much of what science deals with is "resistant" (this is his phenomenological way of saying "objective") to our attempts at reinterpretation or denial. He uses the term "quasi-object" to describe something that's "more 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… They are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society—for unknown reasons—needed to be 'projected.'" (p. 55).
You might remember Lynda from when her last name was Walsh, and she appeared with us on ep. 96 about her book on Robert Oppenheimer and the rhetoric of science advisors.
Buy the book or try this online version. We restricted ourselves in this discussion to books 1 and 2 through section 3.2, plus sections 5.1 and 5.2 to get an idea of Latour's solution at the end. The book that Latour discusses so much about Robert Boyle vs. Thomas Hobbes is Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
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Leviathan and the Air-Pump is a better book than one would know from Latour, shame that Bruno came to overshadow Isabelle Stengers:
https://monoskop.org/images/2/28/Stengers_Isabelle_The_Invention_of_Modern_Science.pdf
I was thinking that one of the feminist science & technology studies crew such as Donna Haraway (the cyborg queen herself), Isabelle Stengers (as you mention dmf… who draws on Whitehead interestingly I think), or Karen Barad (whose Meeting the Univer Halfway is an interesting attempt to create a process philosophy through what seem to me as a non scientist to be a fairly rigorous engagement with Quantum theory and the philosophical speculations of of Niels Bohr).
Haraway is interesting to the degree that she is overtly experimental and poetic, when she wants to lift assemblages from technoscience and see what can be done with them in other contexts, this is a kind of pragmatism/instrumentalism that fits well with Stengers’ own more fleshed out modes of inquiry but Barad seems to want to literally apply quantum phenomena at the the level that we dwell at and that seems like bad science and bad philosophy to me.
https://www.academia.edu/36385115/D._Debaise_and_I._Stengers_The_Insistence_of_Possibles._Towards_a_Speculative_Pragmatism
ps here’s Shapin’s Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shapin/files/shapin-pump_circum.pdf
I use Latour in my thesis (…work in progress) on ecological art & aesthetics a fair bit… BUT I just wanted to say I *love* how displeased Wes was with this reading.
Oh dear.
As far as I can tell, Latour builds a towering edifice of pompous nonsense on the trite category mistake that air-pumps and microscopes and such things ‘give testimony’ and so are ‘hybrids between humans and nature. Talk about overdoing an amusing modest analogy.
And there’s poor Seth, now huffing and puffing against the same Enlightenment Values that allow him to have a good life and a podcast without the state summarily shutting him down. The phrase ‘weeing in one’s own soup’ comes to mind. He’s gone a very long way in the wrong direction since PEL started. Is he OK?
While I’m not crazy about Latour’s presentation, there’s something in the circle (kind of like the Cartesian circle): We used a bunch of material/methodological tools to conceive of objective, mind-independent reality in the way we do (Latour correctly points out that this was not the precise conception of the ancient Greeks or any other time period prior to the Enlightenment), yet we then use the assumption of objective reality to justify these tools/practices. This is not the best text to explore that, but I’m hoping we find one in the course of our looking into phil of science.
I felt the “motte” metaphor captures well Latour’s modus operandi:
This kind of thing has been called “motte and bailey” doctrine, in reference to medieval castles: the motte (metaphor for a defensible position) is the big tower in the middle, and the bailey (metaphor for an extreme, indefensible position) is the surrounding productive fields. A medieval lord would spend most of their economic activity in the bailey (activist/ideologue/maverick spends a lot of time making extreme provocative remarks) but, when an enemy approached (critics attack these statements) they retreated to the motte (respond that what they really meant was this much more limited, more reasonable and defensible claim). Then once the enemy went away (no longer under pressure from critics) the medieval lord returned to the bailey (activist/ideologue/maverick goes right back to making the same extreme remarks).
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/12/07/40828/
As a commentator puts it, “It is helpful to put a name to a slippery tactic.”
Latour and charlatans like him drove generations of students away from rationality and now we’re all reaping the harvest with sick puppies running US and UK:
https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour.html
Lol that Sokal article makes me like Latour even more. “How could the pharaoh have died of a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in the 1800s?”
Latour’s m.o. has been known for a quarter century at least:
https://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074
https://digifesto.com/tag/bruno-latour/
Longtime, lapsed (now prodigally returned?) listener, just became an annual citizen in long overdue recompense for a decade(ish) of provided value.
Anyway, my first listen in a while, great ep, but kinda most intrigued by the Seth / Wes dynamic. Is this new?? Since tis the season, can we get a political / ideological debate ep ??? (Just Seth/Wes or whoever wants to join?)
(Has this or the equivalent already happened?)
I’ll take my response in my podcast player!