Bruno Latour’s Science Is
Politics By Other Means:
Between Politics
and Ontology
Eve Seguin
Université du Québec à Montréal,
Canada
Laurent-Olivier Lord
University of Cambridge,
United Kingdom
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“Science Is Politics By Other Means” (SIPBOM) was coined in The
Pasteurization of France, Latour’s 1984 empirical study of the birth of
microbiology. Yet, it encapsulates an outstanding political theory of science
that Latour has never formalized and that has remained unnoticed to this
day. The theory is comprised of two dimensions. The first one is the ontological
labor performed by science, questo è, the laboratory production of new nonhu-
mans. The second one is the ability of science to devise and implement novel
policies targeted at the new beings it produces. These “other means” are incor-
porated in political projects and contribute to the shaping of society. Fifteen
years later, Latour published Politics of Nature ([1999] 2004), UN
full-blown political treatise equally devoted to the political character of
science. It would be mistaken, Tuttavia, to assume that it falls in the same
SIPBOM paradigm as the Pasteur study. The compositionist theory it offers
redefines politics as the institution of the nonhumans that make up external
reality, a task that has traditionally been monopolized by Science. In this
sense, “science is politics by other means” has become “politics is science by other
means,” these “other means” now referring to “cosmopolitics,” that is, the due
process advocated by compositionism. The first claim of the present paper is that
the respective weight ascribed to politics and ontology is different in The
Pasteurization of France and in Politics of Nature. The second claim
is that compositionism is not as successful as Latour’s early theory to account
for the politicity of science.
Perspectives on Science 2023, vol. 31, NO. 1
© 2023 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00579
9
10
Between Politics and Ontology
introduzione
1.
In 1984, Bruno Latour published in French a two-part book translated as
The Pasteurization of France/Irreductions that has received over 7000 citations
according to Google Scholar (Latour [1984] 1988). Devoted to the empir-
ical study of Louis Pasteur and the birth of microbiology, the first part of
the book has since then been associated to the (In)famous sentence “science
is politics by other means” (from now on SIPBOM).1 No doubt, Questo
tagline has been a key factor in propelling Latour to fame even though
the study has not received the recognition it deserves. In scientific and
rationalist circles, it has been turned into an absurd and defamatory thesis
according to which science is no different from politics and, as a result,
does not generate facts.2 In Science and Technology Studies (STS), it tends
to be interpreted as the mere application of actor-network theory (ANT).
To counter these reductionist views, we contend a fresh look should be
taken at it. The word “science” indicates the object of study whilst “pol-
itics” commands the disciplinary gaze that should be adopted, namely,
political theory. Accordingly, we will see that in the Pasteur study
SIPBOM is the name of a political theory of science.
Fifteen years later, Latour ([1999] 2004) published in French Politics of
Nature, a book that sets out to “democratize science,” as the subtitle
suggests.3 Unlike Pasteurization, it does not offer an empirical study but
presents as a full-blown political treatise. Despite the difference in format,
at first sight it shares with the 1984 work a common feature. In effect,
Latour indicates that it is about “the political philosophy of science”
(Latour [1999] 2004, P. 3). Hence, we might assume that Politics of Nature
falls within the same SIPBOM paradigm as Pasteurization. This conclusion
is all the more credible because Latour has never disavowed his Pasteur
study or repudiated the related catchphrase. Even during his strange con-
version to pragmatism, he was still claiming: “… science and technology
are political, yes, but by other means” (Latour 2007, P. 813). Nevertheless,
we will see that the assumption of a strong communality between the two
works proves erroneous since their theorization of science is very different.
In the first case science is an original form of political action whereas in the
second it is basically an ontological endeavour.
The first part of the present paper is devoted to the in-depth analysis of the
Pasteur study. Scrutiny of recent interpretations of this foundational work by
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1.
For a fine-grained analysis of the wording of this phrase and some of its conse-
quences, see Nelson 2023, pag. 57–83.
2.
In the second half of the 1990s, these attacks gave rise to the science wars led by
physicist Alan Sokal.
3. This subtitle is misleading since Latour fundamentally promotes the state of law,
not democracy (Lord and Seguin, in preparation).
Perspectives on Science
11
key commentators shows that its contribution to the political understanding
of science has been largely overlooked to this day. Since Latour has never made
the effort to formalize the theory it contains, we attempt to spell it out. Noi
show that it brings to light the unique political function of science in the
modern polity, which is to add the control of nonhumans to that of humans
in the shaping of society. In other words, we offer an explicit account of the
political theory of science encapsulated in the phrase SIPBOM. The second
part of the paper tackles Politics of Nature. We show that it contains three
theoretical layers, of which the deepest constitutes the original contribution
of the book: the formulation of compositionist theory. Compositionism
redefines politics as the production and arrangement of the nonhumans that
make up external reality, an activity that has been illegitimately monopolized
by Science since antiquity and must therefore be reformed.
The first claim of the paper is that the respective weight ascribed to
politics and ontology is different in The Pasteurization of France and in
Politics of Nature.4 If Pasteurization combines ontology and politics, Politics
of Nature depicts ontology as politics. Hence, from the first book to the
second we have witnessed the reversal of the meaning of the famous tagline:
“science is politics by other means” has become “politics is science by other
means.” The second claim of the paper is that compositionism is not as
successful as Latour’s early theory to account for the politicity5 of science.
The Pasteurization of France
2.
The Pasteur study is one of the most popular works published by Latour
and has deservedly generated a number of book reviews. Even if such a task
were feasible, our aim here is not to provide a synthesis of those reviews.
Piuttosto, we want to contextualize our own reading by looking into the
analyses of two distinguished, contemporary, and presumably authorized
commentators: Gerard de Vries and Graham Harman. Despite important
differences in the way they approach Latour’s work, we argue that neither
of them succeeds in pinning down what exactly is political in science
according to the Pasteur study. We then turn to a third scholar, Karin
Knorr-Cetina. Although she was writing almost forty years ago, her read-
ing of Pasteurization is much more accurate and useful to understand its
revolutionary character. In the third step, we draw upon Knorr’s astute
observations to sketch what we believe to be the outstanding theoretical
contribution of the Pasteur study.
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4. As illustrated by Harman (2014), periodization is a necessary method to apprehend
Latour’s oeuvre, which spans nearly five decades.
5. The much-needed neologism “politicité” was coined by French political scientist
Nicolas Tenzer (1991, P. 108). Modeled on “scientificity,” it designates the intrinsically
political nature of some phenomenon.
12
Between Politics and Ontology
2.1. Ontological Bias and Apolitical Science
The structure of Gerard de Vries’ (2016) introductory book on Latour is
puzzling (Seguin 2019). The third chapter is devoted to The Pasteurization
of France/Irreductions but de Vries begins to cover the topic of Pasteur in the
second chapter.6 The unifying theme of the two chapters is Latour’s interest
in ontology. Starting his discussion on epistemological grounds, de Vries
puts forward that Latour’s work on Pasteur broke away from the sociology
of scientific knowledge (SSK), then the dominant approach in STS, E
explains the fire of criticism he received from SSK proponents in the
following way: “… Latour had called this reaction upon himself. In the first
place, by presenting his ideas as an extension of the programme of social
studies of science, rather than as an explicit transition to another programme,
which in fact it is” (de Vries 2016, P. 70). Strangely enough, de Vries does not
see that Latour’s was a strategic move commanded by the principles of ANT:
make others believe that what you say is exactly what they would say them-
selves. In ANT parlance, this is called interest translation. Had Latour not
pretended to be walking in SSK’s footsteps, his work might have been ignored
outright. Now as public relations practitioners and scientists know quite well,
negative publicity is much better than deafening silence.
De Vries goes on arguing that after the social turn impinged by SSK in the
1970S, Latour has introduced an ontological turn in the study of science: “To
limit our attention only to social, interpretative processes means neglecting
all the ‘ontological work’ that is required” (de Vries 2016, P. 51). De Vries’
analysis is nothing new under the sun. This claim was made twenty-two years
ago in a commentary on the debate that opposed Latour to David Bloor, IL
main theorist of SSK: “Latour’s approach marks a shift from the social
determinants of scientific knowledge to the ontological labour performed
by scientific activity” (Seguin 2000a, P. 503). Had de Vries acknowledged
this commentary, he might have avoided the mistake of reducing the Pasteur
study to a sole ontological concern. Ontology may later have become increas-
ingly important in Latour’s work on science, it is nevertheless incorrect to
argue without qualification that it was his primary concern in the early
1980S. In addition to pointing out the ontological labor performed by science,
the above commentary further argues that Latour does not share the object of
study of SSK because he is fundamentally interested in the politics of science
(Seguin 2000a). As we will see below, besides ontology the Pasteur study is
predicated on another key dimension: politica. Infatti, the outstanding
feature of this study is the very articulation of ontology and politics.
The count of the words “politics” and “political” shows de Vries does not
neglect politics entirely. Tuttavia, the terms he associates to it are quite
6.
Latour has devoted several books and articles to Pasteur.
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Perspectives on Science
13
revealing. What is political in Pasteurization according to him? Here is the
exhaustive list: doctors and hygienists’ decisions; the games in which doctors
and hygienists are involved; a reading of a term; a domain; forces when
combined with interests; doctors and hygienists’ motives and interests. One
striking aspect of this inventory is the underlying individualistic framing of
politica, which arguably prevents de Vries to grasp the political character of
microbiology. As a matter of fact, nowhere does he qualify science or micro-
biology as “political.” And yet he mentions several aspects, such as “the role of
science in society,” that clearly touch upon the political function of science. Lui
even speaks twice of a “revolution”: “… the Pasteurians revolutionized public
health, veterinary practice and eventually society …” (de Vries 2016, P. 61).
Strangely enough though, he never brings his reasoning to its logical conclu-
sion, questo è, to acknowledge that science is political. Now if revolutionizing
society is not doing politics, what is? Further evidence of de Vries’ failure to
notice the intrinsic connection between politics and science is the omission of
the phrase SIPBOM, which is never mentioned.
De Vries’ book is essentially a general introduction addressed to students
and people unfamiliar with Latour. In contrasto, Graham Harman devotes his
2014 book to the more specialized task of extracting a political philosophy
from Latour’s oeuvre. One would therefore expect him to put much empha-
sis on the political aspect of science, but this expectation is hardly met. Nel suo
analysis of Pasteurization/Irreductions, SIPBOM is not cited in relation to the
Pasteur study but in the section devoted to Irreductions. The section on
Pasteurization is mostly descriptive and remains far too close to Latour’s text.
Claiming that Pasteur’s research is read in “political” terms by Latour,
Harman recalls that the Pasteurian strategy evolved in two steps: first
pre-empting the hygiene movement, then offering reluctant doctors a
compromise. According to him, this shows the lack of distinction between
politics and science in early Latour, an affirmation he explains in the following
modo: “Pasteur’s actions are all alike; all involve the assembly of animate and
inanimate allies in a chain that does the work Pasteur needs” (Harman 2014,
P. 49). What Pasteur ultimately needs is “to consolidate his discoveries”
(Harman 2014, P. 46). This is the kind of reading that explains why
Latour’s opponents have always charged him with downgrading science
to politics in his so-called anti-science agenda.
It should be noted that just as de Vries, Harman frames politics in
individualist terms since he equates it with the strategic action of one indi-
vidual, Louis Pasteur. This conceptualization is problematic since it deprives
politics of any distinctive character. In effect, even if we endorse the
mainstream conception and define politics as a “sphere” or “field,” strategy
is by no means specific to it, and this has long been documented in social
science and philosophy. Jürgen Habermas (1970), for instance, argues that
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14
Between Politics and Ontology
strategic behavior is one of the two types of purposive-rational action that
characterize the domain he calls “labor” as opposed to the one called “inter-
action.” In a similar fashion, Michel Crozier has developed a theory of the
strategic actor according to which despite their formal rules and role defini-
zioni, organizations such as firms allow actors to act strategically in a signif-
icant measure. If Harman shares de Vries’ individualist conception of politics,
unlike him, Anche se, he fails to mention aspects such as social change that
might come close to acknowledging the political function of microbiology.
Taking at face value Latour’s claim that Pasteurization is an application of the
ontological proposals developed in Irreductions, the bulk of his analysis is
devoted to the question “did microbes exist before Pasteur?” In prioritizing
this ontological problem, Harman shies away from uncovering the original,
non-anthropocentric, political content of the Pasteur study.
In short, both de Vries and Harman ultimately read Pasteurization/
Irreductions as an exercise in ontology and miss out on the strictly political
dimension of science, albeit for different reasons. De Vries’ analysis mostly
consists in pointing out the differences between Latour and SSK, which leads
him to emphasize Latour’s extension of the symmetry principle to the onto-
logical human/nonhuman distinction.7 Harman is on the lookout to find
the influence of political philosophy on Latour, but this leads him to focus
on the ontological competition between entities described in Irreductions, at
the expense of the Pasteur study. Admittedly, the two commentators’ onto-
logical bias can in part be explained by the very features of Pasteurization/
Irreductions. This is a rich and dense book that performs several tasks at the
risk of leaving in the background the politics/science interface. Alongside
the empirical study of the emergence of microbiology, it offers a critique of
rationalism, arguably the one concern that spreads over the whole of Latour’s
career. It also takes issue with sociology defined as the sociology of the social
and lays the premises of actor-network theory. The latter is the aspect that
Latourian supporters and most STS scholars have retained from the book.
Lastly, Pasteurization disputes the validity of SSK and, as we have seen above,
replaces its object of study by a different one. As a result of these parallel
scholarly endeavours, the political function of microbiology can go unnoticed.
The Power of the Scientific Laboratory
2.2.
We may hypothesize that an additional factor accounts for de Vries’ and
Harman’s ontological reading of the Pasteur study: their common neglect
of the paper that Latour published under the title “Give me a Laboratory
and I Will Raise the World” in anticipation of Pasteurization. This paper
7.
Strangely enough, de Vries does not explicitly mention David Bloor’s famous sym-
metry principle.
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Perspectives on Science
15
appeared in a 1983 book co-edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael
Mulkay. Two years later, Knorr-Cetina published a review of Les microbes:
Guerre et paix, the original French version of Pasteurization. We may assume
that her familiarity with Latour’s 1983 paper greatly influenced her read-
ing of the book and explains her effective grasp of the political nature of
microbiology underlying the Pasteur study. True, her review contains less
satisfactory threads similar to those pursued by Harman and de Vries,
especially the assimilation of politics to strategic behavior on the part of
Pasteur and the hygienists. She speaks, for instance, of “political master-
mind strategists” (Knorr-Cetina 1985, P. 584). Tuttavia, she does criticize
this line of thought for being reductionist. Così, in parallel she offers a
non-anthropocentric reading, and emphasizes very significant aspects that
could have put our understanding of the Pasteur study on the right tracks
but were ignored by later commentators.
The first thing she notes in Latour’s study is the centrality of the lab-
oratory. She cleverly points out that besides alliances and interests “…
there is another ingredient in Pasteur’s success. Latour considers this to
be Pasteur’s use of the scientific laboratory as his base of support”
(Knorr-Cetina 1985, P. 579). This observation is crucial as it contributes
to withdraw politics from its individualistic framing and to push it
towards science. The second aspect mentioned by Knorr is the microbe:
“The microbes appear (…) as newly recognized inhabitants of the social
world” (Knorr-Cetina 1985, P. 584). As we will see below, the politics
of science centers on nonhumans and this quote shows that Knorr is well
aware of it. The third vital dimension she emphasizes is power. She astutely
remarks that Pasteur uses the lab “… to reverse the power relations
between himself and the phenomena under investigation” (Knorr-Cetina
1985, P. 580). Knorr-Cetina’s review thus makes it clear that among
the many features that define politics, sovereign power is arguably the
most important. This is consistent with Latour and Callon’s later claim
that the laboratory has supplanted Parliament as the locus of power in con-
temporary society. The final aspect highlighted by Knorr-Cetina, also
noticed by de Vries though in a less satisfactory way, is society. She stresses
that the effect of microbiology was “… the transformation of French
society and medicine …” (Knorr-Cetina 1985, P. 583). Far from treating
it as one feature among others, she regards social change as the very object
of the Pasteur study: “The basic question Latour sets out to answer in his
historical investigation is how we can explain the transformation of living
conditions and the ‘revolution’ of the medical sciences in Europe at the
turn of the twentieth century” (Knorr-Cetina 1985, P. 578). Brought
together, the four features highlighted by Knorr-Cetina effectively circum-
vent the ontological bias and could have paved the way for the recognition
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16
Between Politics and Ontology
of the political theory of science embedded in the Pasteur study. Unfortu-
nately, her analysis was ignored by later commentators.
The Politicity of Science
2.3.
The discursive genre of Pasteurization, a case study in the history of science,
is deceptive. Yet, Knorr-Cetina has succeeded in seeing the forest instead of
the trees and this is most likely due to her familiarity with Latour’s 1983
paper which she co-edited. The paper’s title foregrounds the lab whilst the
allusion to Archimedes links it to power. Crucially, early on a sentence in
the text provides the main analytical clue: “… sciences are used to transform
society and redefine what it is made of and what are its aims” (Latour 1983,
P. 144; our emphasis). The italicized segment in the quote carries a
definition of politics, namely, the transformation of society, which is one
of the most widespread conceptions found in political theory and political
science. The first dimension of this transformation is the change in what
society is made of. The second one is the ascribing of new aims to society.
As we will see below, these two aspects are intermingled: achieving
redefined aims is conditional upon a new social makeup and, conversely,
changing the composition of society serves political action. Nevertheless, Esso
is necessary to analytically distinguish these two components if we are to
evade the ontological bias and properly delineate the fundamental content
of the study. In what follows they are analyzed in turn.
The first dimension is the ontological labour performed by science, Quello
È, the laboratory production of new nonhumans.8 Science enacts that at any
point in time society is made up of more actors than is assumed. Researchers
connect events, caratteristiche, and evolutions of society to new, unsuspected, O
uncharacterized, beings. These new beings are not so much “socially
constructed” than produced, made visible at will, controlled, thanks to
the displacements and changes of scale performed by the laboratory, a process
that ends up in “a reversal of the actors’ strengths” (Latour 1983, P. 147). As
noted in Knorr-Cetina’s review, the laboratory is a material setting that
exerts power, and Latour bluntly speaks of “training microbes and domesti-
cating them” (Latour 1983, P. 148). Microbiology makes microbes visible in
a Petri dish, can force them to grow faster or die, and can even modify their
virulence. The controlled fabrication of new entities is undoubtedly the
prerequisite for science to inimitably intervene in the shaping of society.
This leads us to the second dimension of SIPBOM without which the poli-
ticity of science cannot be captured. In effect, the ontological labour of science
8. The word “laboratory” must not be understood as a place enclosed by walls but as a
set of material practices. Observatories, large equipments, mathematical models or com-
puter simulations fall in this category. To capture the generic meaning of the term, Latour
later replaced it by “centers of calculation.”
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Perspectives on Science
17
generates the power to pursue new, redefined, aims. In the absence of such
aims, far from being a political endeavour science is nothing but a freak show:
“Cultivating the microbes was a curiosity …” (Latour 1983, P. 148). Now
science does not operate in a vacuum and its aims are part of conventional
political goals advanced by polities. In the nineteenth century, European states
were engaged in urban reform, the rehabilitation of destitute people, public
health, colonial expansion, the maximization of profit, and so on. Microbiol-
ogy helped these states achieve their goals in an unexpected way. As Latour
points out: “… politics is made not with politics but with something else”
(Latour 1988, P. 56). The new aims set by science thus act as the middle term
that connects the goals of polities and the newly created microbes: “… all the
interested commercial, colonial, and medical interests had to pass through
their [Pasteurians’] laboratories …” (Latour 1983, P. 159).
One can see here why science exerts a unique political function. It
increases the capacity to carry out political projects by means of novel
policies targeted at the new beings it produces. In the case of microbiology,
the original policy that helped reconcile health with wealth is graphically
described by Latour: “Everywhere Pasteurian laboratories were established
as the only agency able to kill the dangerous actors that were until then
perverting efforts to make beer, vinegar, to perform surgery, to give birth,
to milk a cow, to keep a regiment healthy and so on” (Latour 1983, P. 158;
our emphasis). Whilst government implements policies aimed at making
humans act in certain ways, science and science alone devises and imple-
ments policies that are adapted to nonhumans because they are made of a
range of laboratory practices. For killing microbes, science offers a range of
tools centered on vaccination: “… disinfection, cleanliness, conservation,
inoculation gesture, timing and recording …” (Latour 1983, P. 152).
The above discussion shows that the transformation of society by science
does not merely consist in adding to it new nonhumans. Changing the
makeup of society is only the precondition for acting with and on the new
added beings. These beings are integrated to political projects and forced to
obey in a number of social settings thanks to the use of scientific devices.
Così, the Pasteur study brings to light that in modernity the shaping of
society is inseparable from what happens within the lab. Scientific action
leads to a massive increase in the power to achieve set goals and transform
society. Latour puts it in the most vivid way: “Political politics fails, Ma
politics by other means succeeds superlatively” (Latour 1988, P. 142). From
this analysis it can be concluded that SIPBOM is a phrase that encapsulates
an outstanding political theory of science, comparable in scope to that developed
in the 1950s by famous political theorist Hannah Arendt (Seguin 2021).9
9.
For an analysis of similarities between Arendt and Latour, see Seguin 2018.
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18
Between Politics and Ontology
We will see in Part 2 that if Politics of Nature also offers a powerful, E
this time formal, political theorization, it significantly departs from
Pasteurization and ascribes to SIPBOM a rather different meaning.
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
3.
Whereas Pasteurization is a case study in the history of science that does not
follow the disciplinary codes of political theory, Politics of Nature is a
full-blown theoretical treatise in the tradition of Locke or Rousseau. IL
title suggests it is devoted to the politics of the environmental movement
Ma, as we are arguing below, it is comprised of three layers, with political
ecology being only the first, surface, layer. Figura 1 provides a graphic
representation of the book and the theory it conveys:
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Figura 1.
Perspectives on Science
19
As indicated by the subtitle, the common denominator of the three
layers is science, and the book largely draws upon the knowledge accumu-
lated by STS in the last four decades.10
Environmentalism
3.1.
Himself a committed environmentalist, Latour praises the practice of the
environmental movement but takes issue with deep ecology theory, Quale
he regards as a betrayal of the movement it claims to represent. For him,
the discrepancy between the practice and the theory of the green move-
ment is comparable to the fascination that communism exerts on socialism.
Deep ecology theory is but an intellectual resignation since its radical
veneer conceals a combination of two outdated cultural premises, Quale
will be tackled in turn in the following paragraphs. The first one is the
metaphysics of Nature, the second one is the rationalist conception of
Scienza.
In the age-old metaphysics associated to it, Nature is primarily depicted
as fixed and given. Latour points out that Serge Moscovici was among the
first authors to go against the grain and theorize nature as being endlessly
recreated by human action. Di conseguenza, a diversity of natures can be
observed across different societies and the history of nature must be
entirely rethought: “… l’homme créateur et sujet de la nature nous impose
de reconnaître l’existence d’une histoire humaine de la nature …” (Moscovici
1968, P. 28).11 With Moscovici’s lessons in mind, Latour sarcastically puts
forward that Nature is nothing but a “… blend of Greek politics, French
Cartesianism, and American parks” (Latour 2004, P. 5). This leads him to
criticize the two main claims of deep ecology derived from the metaphysics
of Nature. Firstly, the green movement does not bring Nature into politics
for the first time in history. Infatti, says Latour, nature and politics have
always been interwoven. Since antiquity politics has been circumscribed by
the properties and functions of nature, and this has always resulted in
nature getting the upper hand and shrinking public discourse. The invo-
cation of Nature has always served to give political lessons and to reform
10. By Latour’s own admission STS is not a popular discipline. On the one hand, it is
actively opposed by science warriors as notoriously exemplified by Alan Sokal’s hoax. On
the other hand, it is unknown to most people, including academics. To circumvent this
problem, Latour puts into practice the lessons of ANT. He binds his STS-inspired theory
to the environmental movement, just as Pasteur pre-empted the hygiene movement to fur-
ther his microbiology agenda.
11. Man as creator and subject of nature forces us to acknowledge the existence of a
human history of nature.
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20
Between Politics and Ontology
public life. The subject of law and the object of science have been pitted
against one another insofar as human freedom has always been defined and
restricted by the laws of natural necessity. Latour thus laments that “…
ecological thinkers have not devoted all their strength to discussing the
political nature of nature” (Latour 2004, P. 255n15).
The second problematic claim of green theory is that Nature needs pro-
tection. To counter this by now commonsensical idea, Latour uses a rather
telling empirical case. Whereas the 1986 nuclear catastrophe threatened to
make a desert of the Chernobyl area, it turns out that expeditions are now
being organized to watch its burgeoning wildlife. Latour thus challenges
the notion that politics should seek to preserve “the higher equilibria of
nature” (Latour 2004, P. 26). These simply do not exist since beings are
not organized into ecosystems that fit one in the other like Russian dolls.
The entities the green movement takes in charge do not form systems
ruled by the laws of cybernetics. They are organized into heterarchical
assemblages characterized by surprising scales and temporalities. For
Latour, political ecology brings to light uncertain and unexpected connec-
tions between entities; it reveals their unforeseen consequences. Crucially,
the impact of beings does not depend on their ordering from the largest to
the smallest, from the cosmos to microbes. Large and important entities
can turn out to be easily controllable or especially fragile: the Gulf Stream
might one day disappear. Conversely, what is small or without importance
can become decisive: a snail can block a dam. The surprising and varying
traits of entities makes it impossible to continue using the notion of
Nature and it is about time that green theorists realize it. Hence, for
Latour the environmental movement does not aim at protecting a fixed
and threatened Nature but rather at including growing numbers of beings
that no longer present themselves as matters of fact but rather as matters
of concern.
The second untenable premise of deep ecology thinking is its conception
of Science. As mentioned above, not only does deep ecology thinking
endorse an idea of Nature contradicted by the daily practice of the environ-
mental movement, it also subscribes to its twin and even synonymic notion,
that of Science. On this front too, radical green theorists renounce accom-
plishing proper conceptual work. Ignorant of scientific practice, they fail to
problematize Science: “A philosophy of ecology that did not absorb the con-
troversies among scientists would neglect all its intellectual duties” (Latour
2004, P. 255n15). Invece, they are quite happy to regard Science as a mir-
ror of the world. Happily embracing positivism, they believe that Nature is
known through a Science that allegedly produces matters of fact, the central
feature of which is their indisputability. If, as the saying goes, “facts speak
for themselves,” it is hard to see how they could generate uncertainty and
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Perspectives on Science
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disputes among scientists. Hence, political ecology claims to be extending
classical political concerns to new beings without realizing that what is at
stake is the characterization of such beings. For Latour, the one thing that
environmental crises bring to light is precisely the high degree of uncer-
tainty surrounding entities and their attachments. Through a multiplicity
of scientific protocols, entities appear chaotic and unbalanced, sometimes
presenting as local, sometimes as global, at times slow or rapid. Di conseguenza,
the notion of Nature crumbles and Latour argues it should be relinquished
once and for all. Crucially, says Latour, with the end of Nature necessarily
comes the end of scientific certainty about it. In definitiva, he faults deep
ecology thinking for ignoring the most visible aspect of green politics:
“… every ecological crisis opens up a controversy among experts …”
(Latour 2004, P. 63). This leads us to the second layer of Politics of
Nature.
Risk Society
3.2.
The second layer takes us beyond the official concern for the green move-
ment and Latour’s attempt at providing it with an adequate theory. It
addresses a larger topic, questo è, the contemporary evolution of modern
societies, characterized by the breakout of controversies related to environ-
mental, industrial, and public health risks12: “We have installed controver-
sies at the heart of collective activity …” (Latour 2004, P. 117). Politics of
Nature is a typical product of its time. It was published in French in 1999,
at the peak of the widespread interest for the study of “new risks” (Godard
et al. 2002) stimulated by Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society (Beck 1992).
To take one indicator, the Journal of Risk Research was first published in
1998. Allo stesso modo, in the second half of the 1990s, the French CNRS set
up the programme “Risques collectifs et situations de crise”13, Quale
hosted an interdisciplinary seminar that ran for several years and to which
several French and international scholars contributed. In keeping with this
interest of social scientists in risks, the second aim of Politics of Nature is to
delineate a political theory adapted to risk society.14
Beck claims that around 1970 industrial societies entered the second
stage of modernization, which he calls reflexive modernity. They turned
into “risk societies” because the risks they face are no longer external to
12.
Significantly, almost all examples given by Latour relate to public health, not the
ambiente.
13. Collective risks and crisis situations.
14. Anglophone readers may be interested to know that Latour had Risk Society trans-
lated into French and wrote the preface of the book.
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Between Politics and Ontology
them (per esempio., earthquake), they are socially fabricated inside them (per esempio.,
chemical pollution). Center-stage in risk society, science undergoes four
major and contradictory transformations. One15 is the shift from primary
to reflexive scientization in the relation between science and the public
sphere: “Science is one of the causes, the medium of definition and the
source of solutions to risks …” (Beck 1992, P. 155). In other words,
science creates the risks of harm we are facing (per esempio., nuclear technology);
we need it to perceive those new invisible risks (per esempio., radioactivity); and it
is the only means at our disposal to prevent the realization of future risks
and remedy harm when it occurs. The advent of reflexive scientization is
duly noted by Latour: “… the sciences are part of the solution only because
they are part of the problem as well …” (Latour 2004, P. 39).
Pursuing the thread launched by Beck, Latour puts forward that we are
not confronted by an environmental crisis as claimed by the green move-
ment. Piuttosto, we are witnessing a crisis of objectivity, questo è, a crisis of all
objects, “natural” or not. To put this thesis in perspective, he describes the
rather implausible characteristics that objects possess in the modernist
regime. These objects are external and deprived of any connection to
human society, to which they remain utterly indifferent and owe abso-
lutely nothing. If they happen to have unforeseen, often catastrophic,
consequences on society, these consequences do not engage their moral
responsibility and do not retroact on them. In contradistinction to the free-
dom said to characterize humans, they obey strict causality and efficacy.
The same causes always lead to the same effects, the same mechanisms
always produce the same outcomes. As essences, they possess invariant
and constitutive qualities that do not give rise to any uncertainty. They
are universal and impose themselves to all cultures with the same indisput-
able force. Dumb, mute, boring, predictable, amoral, and free-floating,
such are the risk-free objects of modernity that no longer exist in risk soci-
ety. As Latour explains: “Beck certainly does not mean that we are more at
risk today than we were yesterday, but that consequences are attached to
objects in a way that is forbidden by modernism. A risky attachment is a
“smooth” object to which its associated risks, its producers, its consumers,
its cortege of “affairs” and juridical challenges, are finally added …”
(Latour 2004, P. 255n19). Though Politics of Nature is notorious for its
high degree of abstraction, Latour illustrates this point with the example
of asbestos. At first, it was regarded as the perfect material and a miracle
Prodotto. Decades later, its discoverers and manufacturers realized it was
not at all what they thought. Asbestos ended up being involved in a major
15. The three others are the demonopolization of knowledge claims, the emergence of
the taboo of inchangeability, and the extension of scientific rationality.
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Perspectives on Science
23
public health crisis, linked to cancers, the treatment of buildings, and legal
proceedings. In short, it became the central character of a typical public
technoscientific controversy.
The empirical study of such controversies was initiated in the 1970s by
Dorothy Nelkin (1971, 1975, 1979) and Alan Mazur (1973, 1977, 1982).
It has been shown that in a public dispute every scientific statement made by
a researcher will be challenged by another. Latour points out that scientists
have always debated and disagreed with one another but that it used to
happen in laboratories, behind closed doors. When scientific experts were
called into the political process, the debates inherent in the production of
knowledge were concealed and experts spoke in one voice. With the
emergence of risk society, Anche se, this facade is cracking as disputes between
scientists break out in the public domain. For Latour, the public irruption of
scientific disputes is the central trait of risk society. The magnitude of this
phenomenon is such that scientific uncertainty becomes a structural feature
of the science/politics interface: “… two attitudes are possible: we can wait
for the sciences to come up with additional proofs that will put an end to the
uncertainties, or we can consider uncertainty as the inevitable ingredient of
crises in the environment and in public health” (Latour 2004, P. 63).
The blurring of the boundary between the inside and the outside of
science is concomitant to another crucial development: public scientific
disputes involve more people than the sole researchers. Beck speaks of “…
conflictual equalization tendencies in the gradient of rationality between
experts and lay people …” (Beck 1992, P. 165). The legitimate involvement
of non-scientists in scientific matters is greeted by Latour and provides the
ultimate foundation of the third, deepest, layer of Politics of Nature.
Political Deficit
3.3.
This third layer is the most important one as it aims to meet challenges
less conjunctural than those associated with political ecology or risk soci-
ety. It shares a lot with the sociology of scientific expertise pioneered by
scholars such as Philippe Roqueplo (1997). Tuttavia, and this makes all
the difference in the world, it is brilliantly transposed onto the terrain of
political theory. As we will see in the remainder of this paper, it offers an
ontological theory of politics that delineates cosmopolitics and that should
be called “compositionism” (Latour 2010; Seguin 2018).16
16. The theory is often called “cosmopolitics” but this is misleading. For one thing, Esso
suggests too great a similarity between Latour’s and Stengers’ (Latour 2010; Stengers 2010,
2011) lavoro. The term cosmopolitics should be restricted to the designation of the alterna-
tive form of politics described and advocated by compositionism.
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Between Politics and Ontology
This theory is comprised of a radical critique of public life in Western
culture, and a conceptual blueprint for reforming it.17 Prompted by the
science wars led by physicist Alan Sokal, it is rooted in Latour’s life-long
criticism of rationalism and uses as its starting point the portrayal of
Science drawn by epistemology since antiquity. Revisiting Plato’s myth
of the Cave, Latour argues that epistemology depicts Science as a knowl-
edge entirely cut off from anything social or even human, and artificially
creates an opposition between the external world and human society,
each being associated to a string of contrary attributes. On the one side,
Science out there is associated to truths, the objective world of primary
qualities, laws that are inhuman, things as they really are, certainties, tran-
scendence, in short Nature. On the other side, society in the Cave is the
world of mere representations, beliefs, disputes, ignorance, in a word an
inescapable prison with no access to the entities that make up reality.
The philosophers-later-turned-scientists are ascribed the miraculous ability
to detach themselves from the social world, enter the natural world to
discover its eternal truths, and then return to the Cave to accomplish
the venerable task of enlightening the prisoners.
For Latour, only political reasons can explain why such an unconvincing
myth has managed to survive for twenty-five centuries: it silences the
mob18 and gives an enormous amount of power to scientific experts. Hence
his qualification of epistemology as “(political) epistemology,” that is, an
epistemology that covertly pursues political goals and even accomplishes a
policing function: “The trap set by the epistemology police consisted in
denying to anyone who challenged the radical externality of Science the
right to continue to talk about any external reality at all …” (Latour
2004, P. 38–9). This statement is clearly a response to Sokal and other
science warriors and is buttressed by the large corpus of empirical studies
carried out in STS in the past forty years. The phrase that best captures the
spirit of these studies is “seamless web,” which means there is no such
thing as a demarcation line between science and its exterior: scientific
knowledge is at once objective and man-made. But it took centuries for
this statement to become speakable.
Latour puts forward that at the dawn of modernity, the myth of the Cave
gave rise to a “constitution” that organizes public life in two “houses”19,
politics and its subjects on the one hand, Science and its objects on the
other. Politics deals with human passions, interests, will, speech, values,
See footnote 21.
17.
18. This is explained at length in Pandora’s Hope (Latour 1999), which Latour presents
as the twin book of Politics of Nature.
19. As noted by Brennan (2006), one striking aspect of Latour’s rhetorical strategy is
the use of political metaphors.
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Perspectives on Science
25
beliefs, and power relations, of which reality is never a stake. It is charac-
terized by multiple beliefs, endless talk, and disputes. Conversely, Scienza
has to do with nonhumans and their essences, facts, predictable causal rela-
zioni, undiscussable findings, and a single reality. Against this vision and in
line with STS, Latour argues that the sciences, in the plural, are worldly
endeavors that produce about external reality an “ordinary knowledge”
(Latour 2004, P. 13) that is relevant for human affairs. If, by themselves,
the sciences are unable to put an end to uncertainty or provide definitive
answers, (political) epistemology turns them into Science, a grandiose and
unparalleled monopoly to speak about a rigid, totalized, reality cast as
Nature. This is the first politicizing move of (political) epistemology:
“… I am going to define Science as the politicization of the sciences through
epistemology …” (Latour 2004, P. 10). In a second move, (political) epis-
temology opposes the pair Science-Nature to the purely human and rather
pathetic domain of politics, left with very little to deal with, namely,
human passions, interests, and power: “… to politicize also refers to the very
invention of this absolute difference, to this division of roles …” (Latour 2004,
P. 253n9). In the modern constitution, politics is thus amputated of the
bulk of what matters to the profit of “… the other assembly, che è stato
meeting in secret for centuries and whose political work has always been
hidden up to now …” (Latour 2004, P. 58).
Latour frames the activity of Science as “political work” on the grounds
that politics is the power to assemble: “… assembling, composing, unify-
ing, the entirely traditional form that has always been called politics …”
(Latour 2004, P. 29). Despite being officially the polar opposite of politics,
Science performs the exact same task although, one could point out, on a
much wider scale since humans are a drop in the bucket compared to, for
instance, galaxies, the four fundamental forces, or the seabed. Under the
banner of Nature, Science assembles nonhumans: “… as long as the prac-
tice of the sciences and the practice of politics are not treated with equal
interesse, nature appears precisely not as a power of assembling equal or
superior to that of politics.” (Latour 2004, P. 30). It is easy to guess the
effects of the political machinery put in place by (political) epistemology.
Through the pronouncements of scientific experts who get out of their
laboratories to enter the public domain, Science tirelessly bombards poli-
ticians and other laypeople with new entities and facts whilst depriving
the former of a say in the production and arrangement of this external
reality. By imposing matters of facts already assembled in the so-called
natural order, it silences and paralyzes politics: “The indisputable nature
known by Science defined the order of respective importance of entities, an
order that was supposed to close off all discussion among humans …”
(Latour 2004, P. 93).
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Between Politics and Ontology
And yet, this order is badly put together. The modern constitution
allows for the speedy and surreptitious addition to the world of new beings
instantly characterized as essences since their properties are supposedly
given from the outset. Di conseguenza, the ever-expanding reality is poorly
integrated and permanently lives under the threat of disruption. For
instance, says Latour, experts have thrown the entity “climate change”
in the external world only to make it clash with the entity “economy.”
Instead of forming a harmonious whole in which each thing occupies its
rightful place, a cosmos in the Greek sense of the word, reality becomes a
cacosmos. Characterized by secret, absence of agreed rules, restriction of
public speech, concentration of power, and threat of civil war, the modern
constitution turns out to sustain an absolutist regime that must be
reformed in much the same way as the power of absolute monarchy was
curbed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It should be noted here that such considerations belong to the tradition
of liberal thought that goes back to Thomas Hobbes. They are far more
significant in Politics of Nature than the shortcomings of the environmental
movement (first layer) or the transformations brought about by risk society
(second layer). They provide a clear indication of the combat Latour is
really carrying out: Science has always been an illegitimate power. IL
production of reality must therefore be given its state of law.20 The
“historical experience” (Latour 2004, P. 201) we are witnessing is thus
the instatement of “a republic of things” (Latour 2004, P. 55), questo è,
“a Republic finally extended to nonhumans” (Latour 2004, P. 219). By
analogy to the slogan “no taxation without representation” that American
colonists opposed to the English crown, Latour sums up the spirit of the
new republic with the motto “no reality without representation” (Latour
2004, P. 222).
The republic of things that Latour at once prescribes and describes21 is
built on three major innovations. Firstly, it breaks away from the splitting
of public life in two houses, politics and science. Latour reminds us that
nonhumans are always made of associations with humans: microbes do not
exist without microbiologists. Since nonhumans are intimately woven in
the fabric of our lives, in no way do they occupy an alien and inaccessible
domain called Nature. They form a single order with humans, although
this order cannot bear the name “society” since the adjective “social”
20. This is so true that van Dijk (2023, pag. 163–164) has been able to extract a new
Bill of Rights from compositionism.
21.
Latour explains that “…intellectual workers can never do much better than to
help other intellectuals, their readers, rejoin what the demos already brought into the state
of things some time ago” (Latour 2004, P. 224).
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Perspectives on Science
27
“… designates the hopeless effort of the prisoners of the Cave to articulate
reality while lacking the means to do so” (Latour 2004, P. 249). Latour
calls the assemblage of associations of humans and nonhumans a “collec-
tive” to emphasize its political work of collecting increasing numbers of
new nonhuman entities.
This leads us to the second innovation that warrants the renewal of
public life. The former pole of Science officially absorbs the former pole
of politics, so to speak, and this gives rise to an alternative form of politics
focused on the makeup of external reality, “the furnishings of the world” as
Latour puts it. This unconventional politics, called “cosmopolitics,” com-
bines what things are and what people want, facts and values. It extends to
nonhumans the right to be duly represented, it institutionalizes them by
means of explicit procedures. Cosmopolitics is thus the political process of
producing and assembling reality and Latour defines it as “the progressive
composition of the common world”: “The expression [common world]
designates the provisional result of the progressive unification of external
realities …” (Latour 2004, P. 239). The political work of collecting and
ordering entities is “progressive” because it is set in procedures akin to
those of the state of law, known for slowing down political activity and
decision-making. Hence, the main achievement of cosmopolitics is to
“… distinguish the composition of the common world that is built
‘according to due process’ from that of a world elaborated without rules”
(Latour 2004, P. 8). Accordingly, Latour sets out to provide a detailed
blueprint of the new republic, whose functioning is placed under the aegis
of John Dewey and described as an experimental metaphysics: “Up to now,
under the modernist regime, experiments were undertaken, but among
scientists alone; all the others, often in spite of themselves, became partic-
ipants in an enterprise that they lacked the means to judge. We shall say,
Poi, that the collective as a whole is defined from now on as collective
experimentation. Experimentation on what? On the attachments and
detachments that are going to allow it, at a given moment, to identify
the candidates for common existence …” (Latour 2004, P. 196).
This quote points to the third innovation of the republic of things.
Whilst it has been illegitimately monopolized by Science since antiquity,
the political task of deciding the composition of the world now draws
upon the skills not only of scientists but also of politicians, economists,
moralists, bureaucrats, and “diplomats.”22 These people possess different
abilities that are all relevant in their own specific way and must buttress
one another to make the procedures, including checks and balances, lavoro
22.
“Diplomats” refers not to professional diplomats but to anthropologists. Latour
presents himself as one of them. For an illustration of diplomatic work, see Blaser 2016.
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Between Politics and Ontology
properly and achieve a well-ordered world. For Latour, the model of this
collaboration between various skills is the 1997 Kyoto conference on cli-
mate change: “… politicians and scientists, industrialists and militants
found themselves on the benches of the same assembly without being able
to count any longer on the ancient advantages of salvation from the outside
by Science …” (Latour 2004, P. 56). The sharing of the work between
several skills enacts or formalizes a key observation in the sociology of sci-
entific expertise: along with scientific factors, political decision making
must take on board various unscientific elements and dimensions.
Most of Politics of Nature is devoted to the description of the new con-
stitution that is replacing the modernist constitution. It pays a great deal
of attention to the three powers of representation of nonhumans estab-
lished by this new constitution and held jointly by the aforementioned
professions.
The first power is the power to take into account, which belongs to the
“upper house” and seeks to answer the question “how many are we?."
Acutely attentive to the multiplicity of beings that are seeking to become
members of the collective’s common world, it is based on perplexity, questo è,
the ability to be surprised and concerned even by the weakest signs that an
entity is trying to get into existence. One might assume that such task can
only be performed by scientists thanks to their instruments, laboratories,
and ability to question existing paradigms.23 Yet, Latour aptly describes
what the other professions can bring to this task. Politicians are particu-
larly sensitive to the danger of being unfaithful to constituents, economists
are gifted to imagine recombinations of unknown goods and people, E
moralists are prone to express anxiety over neglected research that could
testify to the existence of a being. Consultation is the other task performed
by the upper house. It is the commitment to find and make speak all those
who will be affected by a candidate entity, questo è, the jury of all relevant
spokespersons, including stakeholders and laypeople. For instance, Latour
reckons that drug addicts should sit next to medical doctors and neurobi-
ologists on the panel that analyzes the properties and effects of drugs. As it
turns out, the aim of the upper house is to take into account the greatest
possible number of beings: “The question becomes whether or not we have
caught the totality of these beings in our nets …” (Latour 2004, P. 198).
The second power is the power to put in order. It is held by the “lower
house” and aims at evading the swift, unruly, and disrupting inclusion of
new beings in the world. Questo è, it provides a counterbalance to the upper
23.
It should be noted that science may not be the sufficient condition for composing
the world but it is the necessary condition. Whereas no other skill could produce reality on
its own, Science did so for twenty-five centuries.
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Perspectives on Science
29
house although it is exerted by the same professions. The question it seeks
to answer is “can we live together?.” If the composition of the common
world necessarily intermingles facts and values, the latter are especially
discernible in the first task of the lower house, which is to find the best
hierarchy to accommodate incommensurable beings and allow candidate
entities to live peacefully with existing ones by giving them their legiti-
mate place. As Latour puts it: “The entire collective has to ask itself whether
it can cohabit with so-and-so, and at what price …” (Latour 2004, P. 196).
Hierarchisation is required because the inclusion of new entities in the
common world necessarily brings about changes in the collective.24 Hence,
the first task of the lower house is to review various scenarios of inclusion
of candidate entities. Its second task is the institution of reality. Dopo
much debate, the right ordering of entities is found, and candidate entities
become essences. In an astonishing exercise mixing facts and values, their
qualities, their relations, including causal ones, and their liability, are
decided irreversibly. This brings closure to the debates: entities have been
institutionalized. Crucially though, the process is iterative and endless:
rejected entities can appeal whilst new entities keep popping up.
One resource that facilitates the work of the lower house is the possi-
bility to modulate the properties of the entities awaiting integration. Quello
È, initially entities are said to have habits, not essential characteristics: “…
this is the only way one can carry out the tasks involved in elaborating the
common world without immediately running up against indisputable
nature …” (Latour 2004, P. 242). Per esempio, Latour points out that tra-
ditionally it was assumed that batrachians could only lay their eggs by the
pond where they had been born. This characteristic was forcing operators
to build expensive ducts underneath highways to let the animals safely
reach their place of birth. And yet, it was later discovered that installing
artificial ponds on the side of highways could do the trick: “nature” was
successfully circumvented. The relative flexibility we enjoy in character-
izing candidate entities, Tuttavia, does not mean that all of them can be
integrated in the common world. If no scenario is found allowing an entity
to peacefully coexist with existing ones, it must be temporarily excluded
and left in the status of belief, artefact, superstition, irrationality, and so
SU. Tuttavia, as mentioned above an excluded entity is given the oppor-
tunity to appeal the collective’s decision: “… we place the collective in a
state of alert, to register as quickly as possible the appeal of the excluded
entities that no morality ever again authorizes us to exclude definitively.”
(Latour 2004, P. 198).
24. The nature of these changes reveals the distance that separates compositionism
from SIPBOM. See section 3.4 below.
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Between Politics and Ontology
The third power, the power to follow up, stems from the iterative and
experimental nature of the composition of the common world. As
explained in footnote 21, Latour claims he is merely providing the “con-
ceptual institutions” that account for historical developments that are
already taking place. Tuttavia, things are different with the third power:
“If the historical experience we are trying to decipher (…) has also pro-
posed countless institutions and procedures that await only a new gaze
to become immediately obvious (…) the same does not hold true for the
power to follow up, which is still inextricably confused with the question
of the State.” (Latour 2004, P. 201). Claiming the State of political science
should be replaced by the State of science policy25, Latour argues the State
should no longer be equated with mastery but redefined as the art of gov-
erning. The purely administrative power to follow up involves the same
four professions as the two other powers but primarily draws upon the
additional skill of bureaucrats: “This new competency amounts to being
able to establish, owing to fragile bonds of writings and dossiers, what
is called a paper trail.” (Latour 2004, P. 204). Since all four tasks involved
in the composition of the common world are concerned by it, the power to
follow up must: 1. Accumulate scientific data over a very long period of
time (perplexity); 2. Persistently check the credentials of the parties
involved (consultation); 3. Record the choices already made along with
the parties’ commitments (hierarchy); 4. Multiply the procedures such as
“… votes, signatures, consensus-building meetings …” (Latour 2004,
P. 205) that allow the stabilization of entities (institution). In a word,
the third power’s remit is simply to guarantee that the power to take into
account and the power to put in order are properly exercised. If checks
and balances work properly, external reality is produced and agreed upon
until the next round.
Compositionism and the BSE Crisis
3.4.
As mentioned above, Politics of Nature is notoriously known and at times
harshly criticized for its high degree of abstraction. It uses very little
empirical evidence indeed. The lengthiest example given by Latour is that
of the prion and its link to the political crisis associated to Bovine Spongi-
form Encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad cow disease. In many
respects, this saga obeyed the risk society dynamics captured by the middle
layer of the book (Jones 2001). For instance, decisions on the risks posed
by BSE were made in a context of acute uncertainty, and the final
25. This aspect of Latour’s argument lacks clarity and has led some commentators to
depict the republic of things as a science policy. In our view, it is a renewed conception of
politica.
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resolution of this public health crisis was not brought about by Science but
by a public inquiry composed of a judge, a civil servant, and a scientist. In
the remainder of this section, we will try and show that Latour’s analysis of
the crisis proceeds from, and exemplifies, the ontological nature of compo-
sitionist theory.
The BSE crisis started in 1986 with the “discovery” of a new neurode-
generative cattle disease, dubbed BSE, similar to sheep scrapie and human
CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease). The discovery was reported in a 1987
scientific publication from the UK Ministry of Agriculture (Wells et al.
1987). Since the emergence of scrapie two hundred years ago, it has been
known that this class of diseases is infectious, as their name indicates: Trans-
missible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). In 1988, scientists from the
UK Ministry of Agriculture published epidemiological data that indicated
the disease was transmitted by feeding cattle meat and bone meal made
from carcasses of infected animals ( Wilesmith et al. 1988). Hence, IL
1988 “feed ban” was one of the earliest measures adopted by the UK gov-
ernment to protect animal and human health. It forbade feeding meat and
bone meal (ruminant protein) to ruminants and thus forced industry to
change the way feed was produced.26 The same year, a combined team of
researchers from the UK Neuropathogenesis Unit and Ministry of Agri-
culture reported that BSE could be transmitted to mice by intracerebral
injection (Fraser et al. 1988). These experiments confirmed the new disease
was a TSE and raised the possibility that it might transmit to humans even
though scrapie had failed to do so. Based on infectiology’s knowledge that
the concentration of infection is highest in neurological tissue, the UK
government implemented the 1989 “SBO ban” that prevented high risk
offal such as brain and spinal cord from entering the human food chain.
The SBO ban forced slaughterhouses to change their practices by sorting
out different types of materials and using different tools to handle them.
The crisis peaked in March 1996 when the UK government announced
that a new variant of CJD, dubbed vCJD, had been identified and was
probably caused by ingestion of contaminated beef. This announcement
came as a shock to the British population. Based on the scrapie experience,
UK officials had always categorically affirmed that the risk of catching BSE
from consumption of meat was “remote.” If the crisis had been raging for
years in Britain, IL 1996 announcement signaled its international exten-
sion. It caused massive disruptions in commercial relations and nearly led
to the collapse of the European Union. In 1997, two papers by teams
26. When it became public knowledge, the industrial feeding of cattle protein to
cows offended moral feelings and gave rise to the astonishing notion of “cow cannibalism.”
For an analysis of BSE as a moral crisis, see Seguin 2003.
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Between Politics and Ontology
located on opposing sides of the prion controversy similarly concluded that
BSE and vCJD were caused by the same infectious agent (Bruce et al.
1997; Hill et al. 1997). On 22 Dicembre 1997, the UK government cre-
ated the BSE Inquiry whose remit was “To establish and review the history
of the emergence and identification of BSE and new varient (sic) CJD in
the United Kingdom, and of the action taken in response to it up to 20
Marzo 1996; To reach conclusions on the adequacy of that response, taking
into account the state of knowledge at that time” (UK National Archives).
In October 2000, the UK government announced the publication of the
Inquiry’s report along with the setting up of a fund to compensate victims
of vCJD and their families (Guardian 2000).
TSEs have long been shrouded in mystery since they present the aston-
ishing characteristic of being at once genetic, spontaneous, and infectious.
Inoltre, research has shown that the infectious agent possesses very
unusual characteristics. For years most scientists just assumed it was an
unconventional virus, but alternative explanations were also suggested.
The prion hypothesis was introduced by the 1982 publication of results
reporting that the scrapie agent contains a protein that is required for
infectivity. Author Stanley Prusiner boldly concluded that this protein
was the cause of the disease and coined the term “prion” to denote a small
proteinaceous infectious particle (Prusiner 1982). It was also demonstrated
that this particle present in the brains of diseased animals is the abnormal
isoform (PrPsc) of a normal protein, dubbed prion protein (PrPc), found in
the brains of healthy mammals. According to the prion hypothesis, IL
infectious mechanism lies in the ability of PrPsc to induce the misfolding
of PrPc in a chain reaction. The prion hypothesis sparked a 15-year con-
troversy in the scientific community because the notion of an infectious
protein clashes with the paradigmatic belief that infection requires nucleic
acid, which itself rests on the central dogma of molecular biology (Seguin
2004). In 1997, even though the postulated mechanism of infection had
not been empirically substantiated, Prusiner won the Nobel Prize for
medicine. This award put an end to the scientific controversy, most
researchers now assuming that TSEs are caused by a protein, and consol-
idated prionology as a new scientific discipline devoted to the study of
prions (Seguin 2004). Unsurprisingly, a minority of scientists continued
to argue that the most remarkable feature of prions is their possible
non-existence (Manuelidis 2000).
Latour regards the BSE crisis as the extension of the prion controversy to
the public domain. According to him, the understanding of the crisis
requires “… familiarity with the controversy over the existence of these
candidates …” (Latour 2004, P. 113). By way of illustration, he reports
an exchange between a TSE expert and the French president of the time
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Perspectives on Science
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on the responsibility of “the prion” in BSE.27 But as it turns out, the pos-
sibility that the infectious agent might be a prion was not publicly debated
on the main scene of the BSE drama: the UK. The public controversy
largely bore on the ability of BSE to impair public health. The contentious
scientific question was whether the BSE agent, no matter its molecular
biology characteristics, would behave like the scrapie agent and prove
harmless to public health, or would jump the species barrier between cows
and humans. Crucially, UK authorities were determined not to let the
prion controversy that divided the scientific community interfere with
the political management of the crisis (Seguin 2000b, 2002).
Latour leaves these aspects aside and depicts the BSE crisis as centering
on the prion. This framing has the advantage of shedding light on the ins
and outs of compositionism. Arguing the prion is still caught in the status
of a candidate entity awaiting both integration in the common world and
the essence that comes with it, he discusses it mostly in relation to the
work of the lower house. First paying attention to the third task, he
reviews changes that it might be necessary to implement to give the prion
its rightful place: “Must all European cattle farming be modified, IL
entire meat distribution system, all manufacturing of animal-based feed,
in order to make room for prions and situate them within an order that
will array them from largest to smallest?" (Latour 2004, P. 113).
One can note already that according to this analysis, measures such as a
feed ban adopted by government do not so much protect animal and
human health as they consensually increase the gradient of reality of an
infectious protein.
Latour then explains that the hierarchization exercise will lead to the
right scenario that will institutionalize the prion, thus signaling comple-
tion of the fourth task:
When the solution is eventually found (…) The prion and its attachments
will henceforth have an essence with fixed boundaries. Their descriptions
will be found in manuals. Victims will be indemnified (…) the collective
having changed profoundly, now that it is composed of—in addition
to all the entities that it accepted heretofore—prions responsible for
diseases that are dangerous for humans and animals, and that could be
avoided if the production of animal-based meal and the conditions of
slaughter were modified. (Latour 2004, P. 114).28
27.
Latour provides no reference and no detail on this alleged interaction between
scientist Dominique Dormont and politician Jacques Chirac.
28. As we have seen above, the measures contemplated by Latour were implemented
in the UK years before publication of Politics of Nature. Quello, Tuttavia, does not change the
substance of his analysis and the assessment of compositionism it allows us to make.
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Between Politics and Ontology
Noticeable here is that all the changes the prion candidate forces the
collective to make are put on the same footing. Political measures that
engage everybody in society, for instance the use of public money to com-
pensate victims, are regarded as equivalent to the modification of biology
textbooks, which concerns only a subset of the student population and
their professors. And again, these changes merely aim at making the prion
real. Così, victim compensation seemingly derives from the stabilization
of the causal relation between prion and disease, not from a possible mis-
management of the situation by political authorities.29 Latour’s analysis
of the BSE crisis as working towards the addition of a new nonhuman
to the common world confirms that in compositionist theory, politics is
sucked in ontology.
His analysis also demonstrates the radical departure of compositionism
from SIPBOM. As suggested by our discussion so far, the transformation of
the collective envisioned by Latour, and that occurred thirty years ago,
rests on conventional political means. The measures implemented by the
UK government and reviewed above were informed by scientific knowl-
edge but did not draw upon the power of the prionology laboratory. Quello
È, they did not involve the political targeting of prions by laboratory
practices. The withdrawal of meat and bone meal from cattle feed, O
the sorting out of different materials in slaughterhouses, do not require
the intervention of scientific procedures and products. In short, such mea-
sures do not amount to the politics of science. Unlike microbiology (Latour
1983, 1988), or exoplanetology (Seguin 2015), prionology hardly qualifies
as politics by other means.
The existence of prions as proteins causing TSEs is established knowl-
edge since the 1997 Nobel Prize. Nonetheless, by 2015 20,000 attempts
had failed to make PrP infectious in a test-tube (Manuelidis online), an
experiment that, if successful, would decisively prove the accuracy of the
prion hypothesis. This suggests that prionology has not (yet) acquired the
status of a “freak show”. It probably also explains why it is (still) unable
to recruit the newly fabricated entity PrP in the pursuit of political pro-
jects and the revolutionizing of society. Forty years after the “discovery”
of PrPsc, there is no treatment for “prion diseases,” that is, TSEs, Quale
all remain fatal. Even a non-invasive diagnostic test in pre-symptomatic
individuals is not available. A capacitating policy that would turn prions
into weapons in biological warfare is being discussed as a theoretical
29. The UK government decided to compensate vCJD patients and their families
because the BSE Inquiry has shown that the protective measures adopted were not properly
enforced by UK authorities (Seguin 2000b, 2002; UK National Archives).
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Perspectives on Science
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possibility but whether it will see the light of day is open to debate
(Giordano 2019).
Coda
4.
In the first half of the 1980s, Bruno Latour’s study of the birth of micro-
biology sketched, albeit informally, a remarkable political theory of
science, known as SIPBOM, which accounts for a form of politics that is
conditional upon the ontological transformation of external reality: IL
politics of science. Tuttavia, and this cannot be overestimated, in this
theory there is no equivalence between ontology and politics. Ontology
cannot be said to subsume politics since the production of new nonhumans
is only one aspect of the equation: it must be coupled with policies that
draw upon the laboratory control of these new beings. Science thus per-
forms a unique political function in providing sources of power over
nonhumans which are mobilized in the pursuit of political goals and con-
tribute to the shaping of society.
Arguably, this politics of science explains why modern societies have
reached a status unparalleled in history, carried out unprecedented pro-
jects, and achieved world domination. Present-day polities that aspire to
become hegemonic powers, foremost among them China, are perfectly
aware that science is the royal road to achieve their ambition. Even states
that openly fight the Western world do not dispense with the politics of
science, as demonstrated by the nuclear programme of the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran.
When the science wars broke out in the 1990s, Latour responded with
the genius of compositionism. This theory advocates, and accounts for, IL
end of the monopoly of Science on the production of reality, a production
that is posited as the (covert) political task par excellence since the Greeks.
In this theory, science no longer derives its political character from the
combination of ontological labour and policies targeting nonhumans. As
demonstrated by Latour’s analysis of the BSE crisis, the social change that
science jointly performs with other professions no longer rests on its mate-
rial power but on the identification of the entities that populate reality.
Paradoxically, although science features centrally in compositionism, ulti-
mately it is not the object that is being theorized. That is what the
reversed version of SIPBOM proposed above, “politics is science by other
means,” aims to highlight.
If Latour never made an ontological turn as such (Sanz Merino 2023,
pag. 119–138), his move from SIPBOM to compositionism marks a radical-
ization of his lifelong interest in ontology. Whereas science and then politics
had been central concerns for him at the beginning of his career, reality
later became his primary object of study. Politics of Nature was a milestone
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Between Politics and Ontology
in his evolution that culminated in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Quale
develops a conceptual framework that reduces politics and science to types
of verisdiction among others (Latour 2013).
Sadly, this theoretical positioning is likely to postpone even longer the
acknowledgement, discussion, and use of his outstanding early political
theory of science by those who might be most interested and challenged
by it: political theorists.
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