Luckhurst - Bruno Latour

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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects

Author(s): Roger Luckhurst
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006),
pp. 4-17
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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 figure 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 into that generic French "theory" that
Anglo-
American academies tend to construct. Instead, he has helped refashion STS in
France and America, and the influence of his Science in Action (1987) made him
an important figure in the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular
methodology, "Actor-Network Theory" (ANT), has been extracted from this
early work, although Latour himself has until recently been reluctant to 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 articulated his 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 the exhibition Iconoclash in
2002), and academic critique.1 This is a reflection of his multi-disciplinary
training-he has always combined participant-observation anthropology with the
sociology and philosophy of science, blending empirical case studies with
contentious reformulations of method.
But this mix is also a mark of his desire to shake up the fixed grids of
disciplines formed in the university by a "modern settlement" in 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 demand new ways of thinking.
A witty and elegant stylist, Latour has proposed that "the hybrid genre that I
have designed for a hybrid task is what I call scientifiction" (Aramis ix). He
rather delightfully has no awareness that this was Hugo Gernsback's original
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" for 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 generic knowledge in general, but also proving particularly helpful
in theorizing recent hybrid genre fictions.
BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 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 to 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 in these traditional scientific
accounts to explain error. False religious belief, smuggled into a
leaky and
amateurish laboratory, produce incorrect objects like
telepathy or
ESP; false
ideological biases create instances like Lysenkoism. Once these social intrusions
are excluded, falsehood is eliminated and the proper path to truth is regained.
Good science is therefore beyond any social influences. This divide of social and
technical knowledge produces, for Latour, a damaging political configuration.
The social practice of Western democracy is always limited by an absolute out-
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 is only ever flotsam on the sea
of mononaturalism. The overlaid binaries of social/scientific, political/natural,
subject/object, value/fact work, Latour claims, "to render ordinary, political life
impotent through the threat of incontestable Nature" (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 product of two years
of participant-observation in an American laboratory. Reversing the usual
direction of the anthropologist from center to margin, and directing the scientific
gaze at science itself, Latour absorbed himself in the "tribe" of laboratory
scientists to collect fieldwork on the "routinely occurring minutiae" of everyday
laboratory behavior (Lab Life 27).2 The material collected contested the image
of the laboratory as a sterile, inhuman place, showing that the practice of science
"widely regarded by 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 is a place saturated with 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 reconstruction of 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 and confusing.
Yet Latour's point is misunderstood if he is seen as merely arguing for the
social construction of science. He develops a critique of semioticians who
uphold an absolute divide between world and word, reality and language. Latour
argues that the laboratory is a "configuration of machines" (Lab Life 65), a
multiple, overlapping set of tracking devices that transcribe and translate
material substances into grids, graphs, logbooks, codings, diagrams, equations,
and language. The cultural relativist might say that the objective reality referred
6
SCIENCE FICTION
STUDIES,
VOLUME 33
(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
imposition of arbitrary and discrete signs on shapeless and continuous matter"
(Pandora's Hope 56). Latour wants to challenge the rejection of social and
cultural factors in science, but he is equally concerned to reject facile accounts
that reduce everything in science to social construction or matters of 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).
Latour continues to use the methods of fieldwork, suggesting that it can open
multiple fronts of critique in addition to "la tradition philosophique des commen-
taires de texts" (Monde Pluriel 6; "the philosophical tradition of textual
commentary"). The second strategy of contestation comes 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 instances of
the institutional and ideological formation of scientific naturalism, scientific
controversies (treating "winners" and "losers" symmetrically), or instances of
lost or abandoned theories. Latour borrowed much of the method of the English
historians and sociologists of science sometimes called the Edinburgh School,
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 transmission of disease against unenlightened rivals
in the mid-nineteenth century, but is the master of strategically combining 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 specialist journals,
transport experts, and the French Academy, as well as the microbes themselves.
This sort of sociological history of science has become very familiar (it has
partly dislodged the heroic, internalist scientific biography, for instance). Yet
the apparently chaotic listing of Pasteur's interests, breaching all apparent
categorization or ordering, has become Latour's signature device. Elsewhere,
he lists some of the interests at play in the crisis around the outbreak of "mad
cow disease" in Europe, including the European Union, the beef market, prions
in the laboratory, politicians, vegetarians, public confidence, farmers, and Nobel
prize-winning French scientists. "Does this list sound heterogeneous?" Latour
asks. "Too bad-it is indeed this power to establish a hierarchy among
incommensurable positions for which the collective must now take responsibil-
ity" (Politics 113). This listing is the mark of Latour's third strategy to contest
the modern scientific settlement: the actor-network.
The Pasteurisation of France is the book-length concrete example that
enacted the theory worked out in Latour's most important early book, Science
in Action (1987). In this, Latour traces 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 socialized and produced through "heterogeneous chains of
association": "We are never confronted with science, technology, and society,
but with a gamut of weaker and stronger associations" (Science in Action 100-
101). Although this deliberately intermixes elements, Latour is careful to argue
that a successful statement also 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 purer the science is inside, the
further outside the scientists have to go" (Science in Action 156). There is no
such thing as "pure" science, because these are the laboratories that have 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 is part of a war machine and should be studied as 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,
compressed statement of incontestable and unchanging fact to some, the equation
is for Latour a knot, something that succeeds because it is so well connected,
tightly binding together as it does the maximum heterogeneous elements into a
single enunciation.
The network is figured by Latour through metaphors of knots and loops. 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") is a
passage in Pandora's Hope (1999). Building on the assertion that
"
[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 through a great number of transformations
and translations" (Pandora 97), Latour lists the five minimal loops that need to
be traced: first, mobilization of 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 autonomy since here
8
SCIENCE FICTION
STUDIES,
VOLUME 33
(2006)
diverse, extra-scientific interests are "enrolled" in the support of a particular
science (kings in cartography, industrialists in chemistry, the military in atomic
physics, and so on); fourth, public representation, since "scientists who 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" (Pandora 105); finally, the knot of the scientific concept itself,
harder to study yet part of this topology because it is "a very tight knot at the
centre of a net" (Pandora 106).
These ideas helped form Actor-Network Theory. This is not solely identified
with Latour, and its origins are often ascribed to a joint paper Latour wrote with
Michel Callon in 1981, entitled "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan." ANT has
since been taken up by some English sociologists, such as John Law, who sees
its value in the productive tension between the centered actor 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, Law regards ANT as "a semiotic machine for waging war on
essential differences" (7). Latour has been rather more circumspect: he has
registered his suspicion of the terms Actor (he prefers the term actant, since this
might also include nonhumans), Network (which risks becoming a dead
metaphor, a static topology or grid rather than something dynamically forged by
science in process), and Theory (which Latour claims to avoid as it would
constrain his ethnomethodology of following actors in each fresh situation). He
even suspects the hyphen between Actor-Network as fixing a binary between
individual agency and systemic forces that he wished to displace (see "On
Recalling ANT"). Latour has not been able to kill off the term-a lesson perhaps
that a single actor cannot necessarily control the network-and has more recently
embraced it fully, publishing Reassembling the Social (2005), his first
introductory exposition of ANT. For Latour the "main tenet" of ANT "is that
the actors themselves make everything, including their own frames, their own
theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics" ("On Using ANT" 67).
All of Latour's work in Science in Action and beyond might seem an
aggressive, counter-intuitive sociological theory of 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, tracking how they behave, and the
connections and networks that they create. Embedded in all of Latour's work is
a strong critique of sociological and critical schools that seek "social explana-
tions" of science. Latour does not wish to fashion explanations that decode 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 that have
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: it is not a sort of ether that invisibly permeates everything else as a
hidden context, but is the result of the associations or links that bind together
scientific, political, cultural, economic, and other practices. He appeals to a
BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION
9
"sociology of associations" to replace all critical
sociologies
that use
predeter-
mined categories for determining social groups. Each social object is a specific
set of associations that produces its own terms of analysis.
This approach has the pragmatist's air of the distrust of any system, and
indeed Latour has more than once appealed to the work of William James to
support his 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 inherent
in the ideological construct of Science wielded in the Science Wars of the 1990s.
In Politics of Nature (2004), Latour wants to liberate the practice of the (lower
case, plural) sciences from the ideological stranglehold of
(capitalized, singular)
Science. This will accomplish nothing less than the revitalization of
democracy,
and may even solve the clash of fundamentalisms between 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 unwittingly repeated by Latour: "The
story told is told by the same story" (Modest_Witness 34). 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 not 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 in We Have Never Been Modem to
the war set up between subjects and objects by the modern settlement. Let's now
turn to this important polemical intervention.
The Modern Settlement and Latour's Nonmodernism. From his 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
formulated as 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, subjects from objects. A politics emerges from this dispensation that
is inflexible and often violent: nature is to be dominated; other cultures, refusing
to accept the disciplining of the progressive, linear time of modernity, are
regarded as objects, sunk in nature. Savages and superstitions mix the social and
the natural indiscriminately; science progressively separates these spheres.
"Modernisation consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled
the needs of society with scientific truth in order to enter into a new age that will
finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes
from humans" (We Have Never 71).
For Latour, this modem constitution has always operated imperfectly: it is
involved in a "double creation of a social context and a nature that escapes that
very context" (16), and yet regards Nature (the guarantor of scientific truth) as
pre-given and extra-discursive. If Nature and Culture are co-produced, however,
they are in constant contact and dialogue, conducting endless translations and
mediations. The fury of purification is 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 fact is continually frustrated
and scientific argument inextricably intermingled with political, industrial,
ecological, and myriad other interests. We have moved from "matters of fact"
to "matters of concem," situating the practice of science in wider networks and
longer chains of association.
This transition has been discussed by some critics as the passage from an era
of Science to one of Research, a move from autonomy to the imbrication of
science, culture, and economy: "all these domains had become so 'intemally'
heterogeneous and 'externally' interdependent, even transgressive, that they had
ceased to be distinctive and distinguishable" (Nowotny et al. 1). Latour sees it
as the recognition of the very hybridity that 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 matters of concern, as new entities that provoke
perplexity and thus speech in those who gather around them, and argue over
them" (Politics 24, 66). He suggests we need a re-formulation of the binaries
that recognizes this increasingly populous excluded middle, a space in which we
need to grasp the "nonseparability of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects
"
(We Have
Never 139). This would in turn produce a new constitution and therefore a new
politics: "It is time, perhaps, to speak of democracy again, 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 produced under the umbrella of postmodernism. Some of
his formulations might 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 scathing about the postmodern turn. Whether it is Jean-
Francois Lyotard's collapse of metanarratives into the "petits recits" of
incommensurable language games or Jiirgen Habermas's argument against the
postmoderns for a return to separate spheres of knowledge, Latour considers
these as desperate rearguard actions to maintain the purification that dominated
the modern settlement. The modish Jean Baudrillard exemplifies for Latour a
pointless picking over the ruins of the modern, incapable of conceiving any other
dispensation and sunk in nihilism. In this decadent phase, Latour worries that
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-modern view that is prepared to annihilate all the virtues of the
Enlightenment along with its vices.
Instead, Latour declares himself a nonmodernist: "We can keep the
Enlightenment without modernity" (We Have Never 135). This stance crucially
involves making the subject/object divide far more porous, and rethinking and
extending modem 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 constitution needs to be reconfigured so that humans and
nonhumans are networked together in a new kind of collective. This collective
has been envisioned by Latour in Politics of Nature, where "democracy can only
be conceived if it can freely traverse the border between 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 go from the mixed to the still more mixed, from the complicated
to the still more complicated.... We no longer expect from the future that it will
emancipate us from all our attachments; on the contrary, we expect that it will
attach us with tighter bonds to the more numerous crowds of aliens who have
become fully-fledged members of the collective. (Politics 191)
This is the mature vision of Latour's later work.
Criticism of Latour's work is often tied to methodological questions in the
sociology of science. The key objection is termed by Simon Schaffer "the heresy
of hylozoism, an attribution of purpose, will and life to inanimate matter, and
of human interests to the nonhuman" (182). David Bloor has similarly objected,
in much harsher terms, to Latour's transgression of the foundational philosophi-
cal axioms of modern sociology (see also Elam). Latour's defense ranges from
the disarmingly honest (he suggests to one group of interviewers that his
philosophical apparatus is really "not very deep" [Crease 19]), to the more
serious view that Bloor's sociology quintessentially belongs to the modern
settlement itself, relying as it does on the strict Kantian divorce of subjective and
objective worlds that Latour is specifically trying to unravel ("For David
Bloor"). It is of course a provocation to talk about the "interests" or "voices"'
of nonhumans, and it is in total conflict with the hermeneutics that still dominate
critique. Yet perhaps readers of SFS are less traumatized by this move than the
philosophers of STS. Not only are we more familiar with interdisciplinary
formulations of post-humanism (for instance, in Donna Haraway's recent
attempts to articulate a "companion species" kinship as part of a wider critique
of modernity: see her "Cyborgs to Companion Species"), but also because the
fantasmatic work of sf has been consistently bound up with imagining the
interests of the nonhuman, and has been fascinated with the production of those
hybrid forms the modern settlement would deem monstrous.
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 paradigm that has tended to
dominate sf criticism in recent times. Here, I just want to sketch out the
ways
in which I think Latour can 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" study of a revolutionary transport
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 dialogue between 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
can then escape designed intentions and develop their own "nonhuman" actions.
This mythic structure was also in the minds of many different participants in the
Aramis case: it was formative, rather than secondary or reflective. Sf might
appear like this in other stories: for example, in the oft-told way that the genre
contributed formatively to the military-scientific-industrial production of the
nuclear bomb. H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914) was one of the
important links in Leo Szilard's ardent political campaigning for an American
atomic program; Wells was then hooked into a very different (and in the end
weaker) network of resources for the atomic scientists lobbying to stop first-use
of the bomb, and then for world government after first-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 that cut
across science, technology, and society.
Second, and consequently, the dynamic topology of the network does
something to displace the static topographies of center and margin or high and
low. It is not necessarily useful to dissolve these categories entirely (there is a
certain rigidity to the economics of genre publishing, after all), but they might
be regarded as less finally determining for 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 for the wider culture-as in
cyberpunk in the 1980s (just at the time when sf writers such as Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournelle successfully connected into the circuits of the New Right Reagan
administration). At other times sf remains marginal, decoupled from 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 approach would 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 in 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 less punitively. If we read the history of sf
as nonmodernists, it might then appear that 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 ressentiment that still attends the
genre. Purism is isolationism, which means fewer connections and therefore
weaker cultural influence.
Third, Latour's sense that we live a world of proliferating hybrids 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, and his fictions are frequently organized around spectacular set-pieces
of hybrid creatures that cut across received categorizations. The ichthyscaphoi
in Iron Council (2004) is "a mongrel of whale-shark distended by bio-thauma-
turgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a
man in ganglia protruberant like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on
oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely" (454). This clatter of
adjectival over-determination is Mieville's principal strategy, and reads very
much like one of Latour's lists of heterogeneous elements, combining human,
animal, and machine. A similar fascination with hybrid beings and transformed
modes of categorization informs Justina Robson'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 science and technology also means he is illuminating
in reading much harder sf traditions. An exemplary text in this regard might be
Paul McAuley's White Devils (2004), which is typical of certain trends in 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
technothriller. It is a breathless and 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
exorbitant violence of the John Webster revenge tragedy from which it takes its
name. McAuley also slices through the distinction between "hard" and "soft"
sf. White Devils is undoubtedly hard sf: it is the kind of book that wants to teach
the reader the distinction between mitochondrial and genomic DNA, and its
imaginary sciences are extrapolated from current biotech research. Yet it is also
fascinated with subjectivity and traumatic breaches of human identity, 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 the production of new hybrids that require a reconfiguration
of the subject/object or human/nonhuman divide.
White Devils explicitly thematizes how 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 for less and less....
The nineteenth-century culture of science's Golden Age ... was destroyed"
(314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for heavily capitalized illicit
research, released from any regulation or ethics. It has resulted in the prolifera-
tion of hybrid objects and new actants that 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 in plants: "in the last stages of the disease, the
victims are turned into grotesque living statues, paralysed by hard, knotty strings
and lumps of polymer under their skin and muscles" (24). The inability to
distinguish human and nonhuman is 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 extinct rivals? One protagonist
tracking down the white devil "atrocities" is discovered to be less human than
thought, and the terrain of the Democratic Republic of Congo is full of
monstrosities. Yet the monsters at the core of the tale prove more human than
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-Ronay has argued for a postmodem grotesque, where
"anomalous deviations ... are norms" (72), it may be that the horror of
transgression that has powered the Gothic and the Grotesque would 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 insistence on networks and
tangled objects is Kim Stanley Robinson's ongoing series about the science and
politics of global warming, which so far includes Forty Signs of Rain (2004) and
Fifty Degrees Below (2005). Latour has used global warming as an instance
where "matters of concern" supersede "matters of fact. " Robinson's books 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, traumatized sociobiologists,
and others to persuade a Republican government to acknowledge the 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 of the politics of
science that values the need for "impure" connections, making diverse and
surprising links. With work like this from so-called "hard" sf (one might further
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 largely superseded, as the social
and the scientific find themselves continually imbricated. Thinking about their
work through Latour would demand this supersession as a redundant dispensa-
tion of the modern constitution.
It may be, then, that Latour's work is useful not only as yet another critical
resource to overlay onto fiction but also as a useful guide to articulating the
hybridity of recent sf. It links sf into a network of associations that registers a
transformation of scientific authority in the contemporary world, helping to
explain why sf has become such a vital node in the collective for thinking
through our contemporary matters of anxious concern.
NOTES
1. For law, see La Fabrique; for religion, see Jubiler; for art, see Latour and 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 spoken about the influence of Marc Auge on the attempt to 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 lengthy review of Latour's Pasteurisation of France.
4. John Law also runs the 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 that confounds conventional historiography: "An object, a circumstance, is
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
usually associated with postmodernism. For more conceptual links between Serres and
Latour, see Laura Salisbury's essay in this issue.
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ABSTRACT
This essay introduces the work of controversial historian and philosopher of science and
technology, Bruno Latour. It suggests that his theories of hybrid objects, his analyses of
networks that criss-cross normally discrete categories of science, politics, and culture,
and his displacement of the modern/postmodern paradigm can offer productive new
readings of science fiction, permitting critics to rethink the genre's relation to science and
society. Latour's own "scientifictions" (his coinage) are examined alongside works by
sf authors China Mieville, Paul McAuley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects

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