440311

2012

SSS42310.1177/0306312712440311MialetSocial Studies of Science

Where would STS be

without Latour?What
would be missing?

Social Studies of Science

42(3) 456461
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0306312712440311
sss.sagepub.com

Hlne Mialet
Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Keywords
actor-network theory, associations, Bruno Latour, Science in Action

In his book Prince of Networks, Graham Harman imagines a paradise which would be
the definition of hell for certain Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars a
future where Bruno Latours metaphysics
achieves absolute victory. Through a variety of triumphs and lucky accidents Latour attains
complete hegemony in the philosophical world. When thinking of a year 2050 in which
Latour has become a figure of rigid orthodoxy, [Harman] tr[ies] to imagine the various ways in
which [he] would feel both happy and unhappy. What would be missing from this intellectual
world? If [he were] to rebel against something in such a relative paradise, what would it be?
(Harman, 2009: 121)

Lets try to imagine the opposite and follow the thought experiment laid out in Latours
famous or infamous article on the door closer (written under the pseudonym of Jim
Johnson): every time you want to know what a nonhuman [or human?] does, simply
imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not
present (Johnson, 1988: 299). What would STS be without Latour? What would be
missing? Some would say nothing. I would argue a lot.
When I was doing my PhD with Latour at the Centre de Sociologie de 1Innovation
at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, one of my jobs was to teach engineers sociology of
science. Though Science in Action was on the list of required readings, the only way to

Corresponding author:
Hlne Mialet, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, 7408 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley 94720-2670,
CA, USA.
Email: mialet@berkeley.edu

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make my students pay any attention to the book was to tell them that it was taught at
MIT! As we know, it is always in America that French intellectuals win their lettres de
noblesse. This was in the 1990s, some 4 years after Science in Action had appeared in
English, and 2 years after it hit the market in France. Actor-network theory (ANT) was
relatively unknown; indeed, I never knew what Latour was referring to when he began
talking about actor-network theory, since I had known it as La sociologie de la
traduction [the sociology of translation]. At this time Latour was not very well known
in France, and his work, insofar as it had an audience, was received with incomprehension or out-and-out hostility by the academic establishment, with the exception of
Franois Dagognet, the prolific French philosopher who presided over Latours jury of
agrgation de philosophie. It is thanks to Dagognet that I first heard of Latour. While
studying with Dagognet for my DEA (Masters) at the Sorbonne, I told him of my interest
in trying to understand how science worked in reality that is, in practice. He told me
that this had already been done by Latour, who was teaching only a few blocks away
at the Ecole des Mines. His advice was to talk to him and join his atelier.1
This is how I began my PhD and how I became acquainted with Science in Action
(Latour, 1987). What I experienced upon meeting Latour and reading his book was
tantamount to a paradigm shift: I had been trained according to a specific paradigm in
the philosophy of science, a mix of the Anglo-Saxon (Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, and
Feyerabend) and the French traditions (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Dagognet, and Koyr).
Latours work didnt correspond to anything that I had read or studied before; it swept
the ground from beneath my feet, creating as much discomfort as it did pleasure. I was
forced to reassess everything that I thought I knew about science and its specificity.
In Latours account, the specificity of science didnt reside in the fact that scientists
follow an a-historical or a-contextual methodology, or that their work conforms to universal norms, or that it shares common presuppositions or paradigms. Rather, science
was something much messier, because its practitioners were human beings who argue,
disagree, misunderstand, ignore, betray, talk past one another, and sometimes even agree,
but who always, and in every eventuality, talk and write (a lot). Thanks to Popper I knew
that scientists had dreams and phantasms; from Merton I had learned that they could be
immoral; and I understood from my reading of Kuhn that they, like everyone else, were
subject to emotional crises. But as far as these authors were concerned, what was given
to the scientists (a certain form of humanity) was immediately taken away for the sake of
science. Thus, they invented elaborate systems to contain scientists subjectivity: hence
for Popper the distinction between the context of discovery (the realm of imagination)
and the context of justification (the realm of logic and method); for Merton the distinction
between normal institutions and scientific institutions ruled by universalistic norms;
and for Kuhn the distinction between a conflicted philosophical pre-paradigmatic science and the calm and orderly settled scientific paradigm, and so on. In all my studies,
there had always been ruptures and distinctions between what belonged to science and
what did not; this resulted in scientists who were, for lack of a better term, schizophrenic.
By schizophrenic I mean scientists who are internally fractured, who are on the one
hand creative and on the other critical (in line with the philosophies of Popper and
Bachelard), who are interested or moral (Merton), or who are extraordinary or just normal
(Kuhn). After Latour, all these a priori distinctions suddenly became unnecessary, for the

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specificity of science wasnt to be found in the unique cognitive abilities or moral

competencies of the scientist. The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) had shown
this as well, but Latour was making a different move.
Science, in Latours view, was not about discovering or unveiling a hidden reality,
but about the construction of a reality capable of resisting the strongest objections made
by others. To the question: How does a new and original idea come to mind? we were
told to ask, rather, by which complicated displacements can scientists succeed in creating
what is impossible: a new fact of which they are the author? Instead of looking at the
mind, we were told to focus on the practices of writing and visualizing capable of mobilizing the world by fixing it, making it flat, and thus making it modifiable (recombinable
and/or superimposable) in terms of scale and mobility; and then we were told to follow
how those inscriptions, now immutable mobiles, were reincorporated into texts. Latour,
in this sense, offered an opening onto the real challenge of the anthropology of science
the possibility of producing a convincing study of formalism, without which phantoms
of the cognitive dimension would continue nourishing the mysterious power of science.
Formalism, mathematics, theoretical work, and logic could thus become legitimate
and demythologized objects of study, practices like any other2. Taking up Dagognets
love for inscriptions, graphs, and classification, and more generally the idea that thoughts
can be read on the surfaces of things, Latours innovation was to redirect the philosophy
of science towards the anthropology of inscriptions and their circulation.
But what was at stake in Science in Action was as much about Latours attack on
social explanations as about immutable mobiles and the role of non-humans.3 If Latour
was fighting the French epistemological tradition (as represented by Bachelard and
Canguilhem), he was also fighting French sociology (particularly, Bourdieu) and allying
with Luc Boltansky and Laurent Thvenot (see, for example, Mialet, 2003). The principle
of generalized symmetry was the coup de grace in the tradition of Copernicus, Darwin,
and Freud to the predominance of the subject, reduced here to the rank of the nonhuman. While social constructivists fought against methodological individualism, ANT
jettisoned the belief in a pre-existing social reality that constrains the behavior of
individuals by reintroducing the role of non-humans. Thus, if studying the psychology of
scientists was forbidden as this might lead to an epistemology that established science
as rationality of method or of cognitive processes4 so too was the use of sociological
explanations of science as this might lead to a sociology that values norms of the community (Merton), or that attributes hidden interests to the actor (Bourdieu and SSK).
With what were we left to study the actors of knowledge production? Latours innovation was to direct our attention to the traces left by humans and things circulating
through the collective, a kind of palpability, a materialization of their presence and
action. The importance of using the tools of anthropology, namely ethnographic observation, and the imperative to go into the field was more than a methodological prescription; it was the backbone of the theory itself. For ANT, actors were not endowed a
priori with specific competences. These competences were constructed in trials of
strength. And it was only in a network that their qualities could be revealed. The strength
of the actor was linked, in this sense, to the solidity and number of associations woven
and stabilized in the network. In ANT, actors were the spokespersons for all the humans
and nonhumans with which they associated. Indeed, the actor is equal to the sum total

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of the associations that she weaves. If one association disappears, new displacements
appear to divert actors from obligatory passage points, spokespersons are denounced or
undermined, and the actor who holds the network together changes along with the configuration of the network. In ANT, we find that the actor is both everywhere and
nowhere at the same time: sometimes a particular node, sometimes an entire network,
sometimes flesh, sometimes matter, sometimes an all powerful social genius, sometimes
absent, and sometimes interchangeable (Mialet, 2009). As Chateauraynaud says:
A descriptive and specific category of the human being is missing. It is a kind of anthropology
inspired by Hume that seems to forbid any autonomy to questions relative to the human actor,
to her dispositions (cognitive and esthetic capacities), to her interactions with her peers [ses
semblables], to her motivations to act or to her interpretative elaborations. (Chateauraynaud,
1992: 477, my translation)

My challenge, upon becoming acquainted with Latours work, was how to rethink the
characteristics of the human being or the knowing subject by using the tools, the strengths,
and taking into account the limits of ANT (Mialet, 1999, 2012). In other words, what
could we say about singularity? And more specifically in the present context what
can we say about the singularity of Bruno Latour? Lets do what he suggests, and follow
the inscriptions.
In Science in Action, Latour says: You need [others] to make your [book] a decisive
one. If they laugh at you, if they are indifferent, if they shrug it off, that is the end of your
[book] (Latour, 1987: 104). But there is something still worse than being either
criticized or dismantled by careless readers: it is being ignored (p. 40). None of this happened to Science in Action. Indeed, it was carefully crafted to make sure of this. Today,
after having read it one more time with this essay in mind, I see running under its skin
numerous articulations that make Latours way of thinking so specific. For example:
(1) His interest in religion that directed his attention toward the circulation of statements;
(2) His interest in semiotics developed with Franoise Bastide that allowed him to
avoid making distinctions between humans and nonhumans and to move from the micro
to the macro without changing repertoires; (3) His interest in inscriptions, building on the
French tradition in epistemology with Franois Dagognet; (4) His interest in integrating
social and natural sciences, and literary and scientific cultures, in the lineage of Michel
Serres; (5) His interest, developed in conversation with Michel Callon, in understanding
the creation of asymmetries and irreversibilities, and in the possibility of acting at a
distance.5 But also, I could see how Latour chose his allies and attempted to weaken or
paralyze his enemies (p. 37), and how he tried to rethink and rewrite, appropriate, and
inflect, the ideas of other scholars, and to place them in new and different contexts.
Shapin, Collins, and Yearley, for example, have all commented on how Latour endeavored to enroll SSK to fight his own battles, by trying to convince them that their way
forward had been cut off or was a dead end thus putting into action the second moment
of translation (Latour, 1987: 120). Latour was criticized as morally dangerous
(Amsterdamska, 1990), or not revolutionary at all; indeed, what he was offering was
perceived as a retreat or a step backward (Collins and Yearley, 1992; Shapin, 1988). To
use Latours own vocabulary, he didnt succeed in enrolling the sociologists of scientific
knowledge in the construction of ANT, nor did he succeed in controlling their behavior
in order to make their action predictable (Latour, 1987: 108). As Harman comments:

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Latour is attacked simultaneously for opposite reasons. For mainstream defenders of

science, he is just another soft French relativist who denies the reality of the external
world. But for disciples of Bloor and Bourdieu, his commerce with non-humans makes
him a sellout to fossilized classical realism (Harman, 2009: 5). Shapin (1988) was quick
to mention that if scientists in Latours account didnt have interests, they certainly
seemed to have goals. And according to him, one could rewrite Science in Action in
terms of investments.6 Moreover, he complained of the absence of any role for skill in
Latours account. Latour, with Callon, in turn rewrote and enrolled his critics by adding
and attributing skill at every step:
Our general symmetry principle is thus not to alternate between natural realism and social
realism but to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity, one that is more
interesting for us. We call it network building, or collective things, or quasi-objects, or trials
of force ; and others call it skill, forms of life, material practice. (Callon and Latour,
1992: 348)7

Despite their criticisms, Latour, true to his method, attempted to enroll his critics as
allies. Thus, Latour concluded that Collins and Yearley were interested in the same things
without knowing it: once we abandon the twin resources of nature and society, we are
all, it seems, looking for the same explanation the stabilization of [Mary] Hesses or
some other associationist network but we disagree on what a network is made of and
how to empirically calculate or account for [it] (Callon and Latour, 1992: 363). Is
Science in Action then an autobiography?
For sure, the multiple translations that composed the specific texture of this book
I tried here to pinpoint a few of the traditions with which it is intertwined as much as
the multiple translations in which the book was caught up, transformed Latour into an
important player in the field and by the very same process fleshed out his theories (or
made them truer?). In other words, it showed by which complicated displacements one
can succeed in creating what is impossible: a new theory of which he is the author. And
indeed, thanks to all of us, allies, critics, or enemies, and of course, Latours own charisma
and insight those very facts that his theory fails to take into account STS became
populated with interesting new entities, ideas or concepts: the non-human, the immutable
mobile or inscription, the center of calculation, and more broadly, a redefinition of the social
and the political, as well as a new role for the social sciences. It seems difficult now to
avoid these innovations, unless we declare, not a 10-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science as Latour proposed at the end of Science in Action (p. 247), but rather
a 10-year moratorium on Latours own symmetrical anthropology.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Charlotte Cabasse, Michael Wintroub, Michael Lynch, and Sergio Sismondo
for their comments.

Notes
1. I love this expression, which for Dagognet meant either that Latour was at the head of a kind
of a repair shop, factory, or laboratory since it was question of science and practice after all
he was a philosopher or that he was at the head of a studio la Rembrandt (see Alpers, 1988).

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2. Though SSK (and especially Bloor) demythologized mathematics as an object of study, Latour
proposed different tools to accomplish this goal.
3. Ian Hacking seems to be one of the few who early on really saw the importance of non humans;
see his review of Science in Action (Hacking, 1992).
4. Or would not be of interest for someone such as Popper who doesnt see any point in studying
the psychology of the scientist to understand the specificity of science.
5. The list is obviously much longer. One could add Madeleine Akrich, Antoine Hennion, Shirley
Strum, and others who could be traced throughout the footnotes of his books.
6. See also, Joan Fujimura, who points out that Latour does not pay enough attention to institutionalized, long-term lines of action that constrain or facilitate the capabilities of scientists to
enroll, organize, and discipline allies (Fujimura, 1989: 790).
7. Latour and Callon refer specifically to texts by Lynch and Shapin and Schaffer in this passage.

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Biographical note
Hlne Mialet teaches in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She
is the author of LEntreprise Cratrice, Le rle des rcits, des objets et de lacteur dans linvention
(Herms-Lavoisier, 2008) and Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of
the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012, in press).

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