Bruno Latour 1947-2022
Image: Bruno Latour. Source: G.Garitan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Matthias Wieser
Born in June 1947, the son of a bourgeois and catholic family in Beaune in Burgundy, Bruno Latour remained at a distance from the secular and leftish academic milieu of Paris. In addition to being a scion of a catholic wine dynasty from the French provinces, he also studied Philosophy and Theology not in Paris but in Dijon and Tours. In 1975 he defended his thesis on Charles Péguy’s idea of the relationship between exegesis and ontology. A question that remained with him throughout all the various twists and turns of his philosophical thought and writing (see Schmidgen 2014). His military service took him to the Ivory Coast where he wrote an ethnography on decolonisation and industrialisation for the French Institute for Development; a work which helped to shape his self-image as an anthropologist and sociologist.
After military service, he moved to the US where he met British sociologist Steve Woolgar. Together they started an ethnography of a neuroendocrinology laboratory directed by the 1977 Nobel Prize winner for medicine, Roger Guillemin, another Burgundian. This work later developed into a co-authored book entitled Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). The book became highly influential in what was at the time the new sociology of science, or what might now be described as science and technology studies. Its innovative method involved the application of ethnography to scientific research, analysing the mundane world of scientists and experts in a scientific laboratory as a ‘foreign’ subculture with its own everyday rules and rituals. They were in the right place at the right time, the time of Californian Qualitative Methods (Garfinkel 1967; Knorr Cetina 1981). But the innovation was not only methodological; it was also theoretical in the sense that the book intervened in theoretical debates of that time on “the social construction of scientific facts” as the subtitle of their book claimed, and later in the second edition was partly dropped as Latour never became tired of reminding.. The book emphasised the “worldliness,” or as the later Latour might have said the “groundedness” of science in the web of politics, economics, rhetoric and more. The book already drew attention to the materiality of scientific practices through the notion of inscription devices, which was to play a special role in his thinking.
Upon his return to France, he worked for nearly 25 years at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at the French technical elite university École des mines de Paris (since 2008 Mines ParisTech). At the Jardin de Luxemburg he developed together with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, Antoine Hennion and others what became known as actor-network theory, which was first called “sociology of translation” (Callon 1986). This took inspiration from the philosophy of science of Michel Serres – a crucial influence on their theorizing alongside Deleuze (Latour 2002), followed a bit later by the pragmatism of William James and the sociology of Gabriel Tarde. For Latour, fellow researchers in science technology such as Donna Haraway, John Law, Isabelle Stengers, Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker, as well as anthropologists Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, were crucial inspirations for his research. His habilitation universitaire at EHESS in Paris, made into his book Science in Action (Latour 1987), became a key methodology text for the Centre for studying not only the sciences and technological innovations, but also music, media and medicine in different case studies. This productive and inspiring text brought the centre’s approach some prominence within the field of social studies of science and technology with Latour at the centre of attention, to the extent that he was further drawn into the wider “Science Wars” that affected the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s (Latour 1999).
At that time, Latour also gained prominence outside the field of science and technology with his essay on how “we have never been modern” (Latour 1993). This proved to be his most successful book to date, with Latour critically intervening in the debates about modernity and postmodernity by taking his own trenchant position (Latour 2003). From this point his work diverged in at least three directions: one is writing ANT into the curriculum as with Reassembling the Social (Latour 2007), another is probing his approach in other fields than science and technology as religion, economics and law which feed into An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Latour 2013) that outlines his philosophy and reconstructs the foundations of an ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences. A third line is his dealing with the ecological question of the climate crisis with which he had already opened in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). From Politics of Nature (Latour 2004), to Facing Gaia (Latour 2017) and Down to Earth (Latour 2018), one can ascertain an increasing urgency in Latour’s writings in demanding a move from social to geosocial questions in the world, which are always also technoscientific questions (Latour 2016; Stein Pedersen/Latour/Schultz 2019).
Latour was not only probing theory as empirical philosophy beyond disciplinary boundaries, but also engaging with the public and the arts in particular ways. Already from his early writings on, he used illustrations, comic strips and photographs or different writing styles not common to the social sciences and humanities. He was a master of an original way of scientific reasoning coining neologisms and memorable phrases such as “follow the actors”, “technology as society made durable”, or “critique running out of steam”. He curated four exhibitions with Peter Weibel for the ZKM in Karlsruhe on Iconoclash (Latour/Weibel 2002), Making Things Public (Latour/Weibel 2005), Reset Modernity (Latour 2016) and Critical Zones (Latour/Weibel 2020); he wrote a play together with Chloé Latour und Frédérique Ait-Touatti that was also adopted for radio (Latour/Ait-Touatti/Latour 2011). With his appointment at the prestigious Sciences Po in 2007, he found the médialab and a Master in Arts and Politics (SPEAP) , which offered him a programme and space to experiment in an inter- and transdisciplinary fashion – for him the only appropriate way of doing science in the 21st century that deal with matters of concern.
Throughout his life Bruno Latour received many awards such as the Unseld Prize 2008, the Holberg Prize 2013, the Spinoza Prize 2020 and the Kyoto Prize 2021, perhaps the most important for him.
On the 9th of October 2022 Bruno Latour passed away. A genuine, provocative and creative theorist that transgressed the boundaries of disciplines to experiment for a better understanding of the cosmos. A theorist of contemporary technological culture and society that did not take himself seriously, although he loved serious theorizing. In the last decade of his life in particular, his writing revealed a sincere admonisher, which made him a more critical theorist than his post-criticism suggests.
References
Callon, Michel (1986) ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’. The Sociological Review 32: 196–233.
Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Knorr-Cetina, Karin D. (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2002) ‘Morality and Technology: The End of Means’. Theory, Culture & Society 19(5-6): 247–260.
Latour, Bruno (2003) ‘Is Re-modernization Occurring - And If So, How to Prove It? A Commentary on Ulrich Beck’. Theory, Culture & Society 20(2): 35–48.
Latour, Bruno (2004) ‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.’ Body & Society 10 (2-3): 205–229.
Latour, Bruno (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2016) ‘Why Gaia is not a God of Totality’. Theory, Culture & Society 34(2-3): 61-81.
Latour, Bruno (ed.) (2016) Reset Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno, Frédérique Ait-Touati and Chloé Latour (2011) Cosmocoloss: A Radio-play.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (2020) Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.) (2002) Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.) (2005) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, London: Sage.
Schmidgen, Henning (2014) Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography, New York: Fordham University Press.
Stein Pedersen, Jakob Valentin; Latour, Bruno; Schultz, Nikolaj (2019) ‘A Conversation with Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz: Reassembling the Geo-Social’. Theory, Culture & Society 36(7-8): 215 – 230.
Matthias Wieser is Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Theory at the Department of Media and Communications, University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Email: Matthias.Wieser@aau.at
