introduzione: Scienza - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

introduzione: Scienza
Is Politics By Other
Means Revisited

Eve Seguin
Université du Québec à Montréal,
Canada

Dominique Vinck
Institut des Sciences Sociales,
University of Lausanne,
Svizzera

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In the past forty years, Bruno Latour’s claim that Science Is Politics By
Other Means (SIPBOM) has been the underlying creed of Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS), most of us simply taking it for granted. In contrasto,
this special issue is predicated on the observation of an enduring lack of exe-
gesis of this catchphrase so remarkable that is has caused an outcry among
natural scientists, echoed in some social science quarters. If SIPBOM has been
a resource for decades, by turning it into a topic this special issue revisits one of
the most exciting and challenging insights of contemporary thought.

At the time of sending to press this special issue of Perspectives on Science, we
learn with regret of the passing of Bruno Latour (Giugno 22, 1947 – October
9, 2022). In this issue, we have endeavored to capture the ideas of what we
believe to be the greatest thinker of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Part of our
aim was also to understand how those ideas have helped further our own.
We were hoping Monsieur Latour, as Anglophones used to call him, would
ﬁnd our readings and experiments worth commenting upon. Sadly, his
untimely death has now made it impossible. RIP.

Since its inception, Bruno Latour’s claim that “science is politics by other
means” (SIPBOM) has circulated intensely in the academic world and beyond
(Latour 1983, 1988). It has become the underlying creed of Science and
Technology Studies, where it seems to have shifted the focus of attention
from science to politics (Seguin 2000). Nowadays, most of us take it for

Perspectives on Science 2023, vol. 31, NO. 1
© 2023 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_e_00578

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introduzione

granted even though its meaning remains rather ambiguous. Here are some
interpretations found in scientiﬁc literature, with no claim to exhaustivity:

(cid:129) The contestation of scientiﬁc ideas (Edgecoe 2001)
(cid:129) Policies targeted at nonhumans (Seguin 2015)
(cid:129) The laboratory as a form of power (Knorr-Cetina 1985; Pels 2003)
(cid:129) The struggle for the public interpretation of reality (Vandenberghe

2014)

(cid:129) The building of alliances between nonhumans and social interests

(Brown 2015)

Accordingly, SIPBOM raises a number of questions about:

Its interpretive diversity and the compatibility of meanings it has
been ascribed. Do the above, and other, interpretations overlap, E
to what extent? Are they complementary or incompatible? Are they
equally valid in relation to Latour’s writings? Do they have equal
relevance for empirical research?
Its coherence with other aspects of Latour’s work. How does it
connect to other approaches used by Latour, such as actor-network
theory (Latour 1987), or the extended symmetry principle (Latour
1993)?
Its links to other theoretical approaches found in STS and else-
Dove. How does it stand in relation to Bennett’s vital materialism
(Bennett 2010), Foucault’s power/knowledge (Foucault 1977), O
Jasanoff’s co-production idiom (Jasanoff 2004)?
Its impact on disciplines other than STS, foremost among them
political theory. Why is Latour not widely regarded as a political
thinker when politics pervades his entire work (Harman 2014,
Seguin 2017)? Why has it not led political theorists to embrace
science as an object of study? What inﬂuence does it have in other
disciplines such as epistemology or sociology? Do Latour’s explicit
writings on politics actually depart from SIPBOM? (Latour 2004a)
What can we learn from the debates he had with political scientist
Pierre Favre, philosopher Gerard de Vries, or sociologist Ulrich
Beck in the mid-2000s (Favre 2008; Latour 2004b, 2007, 2008)?
Its capacity to transform political institutions and inﬂuence political
developments.
Its explanatory power and various uses in empirical research. Have
case studies in STS paid lip service to it? How has it enhanced
rather than impoverished our understanding of both science and
politica? How useful has it been for the conduct of empirical
research? Is it still relevant today?

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Perspectives on Science

If SIPBOM is mainly a resource in STS, the purpose of this special issue is
to turn it into a topic, and to reﬂect upon the above and related questions.
The special issue thus provides an opportunity to revisit one of the most
exciting and challenging insights of contemporary thought.

In their article “Science is Politics by Other Means: Between Politics
and Ontology,” Eve Seguin and Laurent-Olivier Lord discuss the changing
relationship between ontology and politics in Latour’s analysis of science
over the years. First revisiting Latour’s empirical study of the birth of
microbiology as outlined in The Pasteurization of France and the comple-
mentary paper published the year before, they put forward that the clues
for properly understanding it were given nearly forty years ago by Karin
Knorr-Centina, a STS scholar not associated with Latour. Taking her
distance from both the ontological bias and individualistic depiction of
politics that characterize several commentaries, Knorr-Centina rightly
saw the Pasteur study as a demonstration of the power of the scientiﬁc
laboratory. Building on this insight, Seguin and Lord contend the Pasteur
study offers, though it was never formalized, an outstanding political
theory of science that combines politics and ontology. The “other means”
of the tagline refer at once to the ontological labor of science and its imple-
mentation of policies that target nonhumans and partake in political
projects. In the second part of their paper, they turn to Latour’s political
treatise Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Unlike
scholars who reduce it to a science policy, they argue that it redeﬁnes
politics as the production of external reality, an activity that has been ille-
gitimately monopolized by Science since antiquity and must be reformed.
Seguin and Lord conclude that the book thus breaks away from the Pasteur
study in conceptualizing politics as ontology. Despite the continued focus
on science, it develops an ontological theory of politics and reverses the
meaning of “science is politics by other means.”

In his article “Latour and Schmitt: Political Theology and Science,"
Stephen Turner discusses the relation between Latour’s and Carl Schmitt’s
political theories, paying particular attention to Latour’s revisions of
Schmittian theory. Latour systematically replaces the concepts of Schmitt’s
meta-theology of politics, whilst retaining the basic structure of Schmitt’s
thought and expanding it. Turner argues that Latour has taken up
Schmitt’s notion of representation and thus qualiﬁes as a Schmittian.
Nevertheless, he has replaced the Schmittian concept of acclamation by
those of collectives and the public, has used translation and transubstanti-
ation to replace Schmitt’s decisionism, and has substituted the cosmopoli-
tical for the political. Whether Latour’s revision has upstaged Schmitt is
debatable, Anche se. For Schmitt, all political concepts are disguised theo-
logical concepts because metaphysics and political theology cannot be

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introduzione

disentangled, as shown by the autonomous individual postulated by liber-
alism, or by Marxist social classes ascribed agential powers. Schmitt’s crit-
ical political theology is the analysis of the secularization of the concepts of
acclamation and the political. Turner sheds light on the parallel structures
of Schmitt’s and Latour’s thought. He concludes that in redeﬁning agency,
Latour offers an alternative political theology, not a meta-theology that
could be interpreted within the parameters of Schmitt’s theory.

In his article “Attending to Latour’s Militaristic Rhetoric and Politics
‘With Other Means’,” Lee Claiborne Nelson focuses on lesser known
aspects of Latour’s work. His claim is that Latour ultimately aims at chart-
ing a different Leftist approach. Nelson ﬁrst observes that von Clausewitz’s
famous phrase on war and politics was wrongly translated as “by other
means” when it should have read “with other means.” Applying the right
translation to Latour’s catchphrase is more in keeping with his thinking as
it maintains politics as a central means to build society. Latour’s abundant
use of militaristic metaphors shows that his politics must be read from a
military standpoint. Taking advantage of this observation, Nelson inter-
prets Latour’s politics, especially his environmental concern, with the
military theory distinction between pitched battle and Fabian strategy.
The neoliberal Right is ﬁghting the implications of climate change in
Fabian fashion, questo è, by instilling doubt about the reality of climate
change. Latour points out that the green Left is trying to counter this
strategy by upholding a modernist vision seeking to win the war through
certainty and closure of the controversy. Nelson shows that in lieu of such a
pitched battle, Latour proposes a non-modernist politics. We should accept
living in a war of the worlds upheld by heterogeneous groupings building
friends and foes relations. Without the help of the Nature-Culture divide,
the Left must engage in struggles over the conﬁguration of existence.

In their article “Politicizing Algorithms by Other Means: Toward
Inquiries for Affective Dissensions,” Florian Jaton and Dominique Vinck
address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life by means
of Latour’s trajectory of issues, which sketches the ﬁve meanings of the
term “political” deﬁned as moments or stages in the life of an issue.
Reworking Latour’s model, they put forward that the introduction of
new entities and the changes they bring about in the collective world,
which correspond to the ﬁrst meaning of political, is often the outcome
of naturalized habits, the ﬁfth meaning. That is what is happening with
algorithms: their contemporary multiplication in the collective is the out-
come of their naturalized deﬁnition as computerized methods for problem
risolvere, upheld by academics and business people. Algorithms have man-
aged to generate the concerned publics that give its second meaning to
political, and are currently the object of regulation attempts, which also

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Perspectives on Science

make them political in the fourth meaning, that of governance. Tuttavia,
these attempts are very unlikely to curb the political impact of algorithms
since they have so far failed to reach the third stage of the politicization
processi, characterized by a frontal conﬂict between allies and adversaries.
For Jaton and Vinck, the inability of algorithms to create lines of confron-
tation is due to the impoverished ontological soil that accompanies their
institutional deﬁnition. Using materials from an ethnographic study con-
ducted in a computer science laboratory, they argue that by digging into
the genealogy of algorithms’ constricted deﬁnition and associated ontolog-
ical slimness, and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships
more visible, historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascu-
larizing them and turning them into objects of enlarged disputes.

In her article “Latour on Politics: Political Turn in Epistemology or
Ontological Turn in Politics?,” Noemí Sanz Merino challenges two wide-
spread interpretations of Latour’s recent work. The ﬁrst one is the main-
stream STS view that Politics of Nature has introduced an ontological turn
in politics. Sanz Merino disputes this view and emphasizes the continuity
in the conceptual foundations of Latour’s thinking. She argues that the
emergence of actor-network theory (ANT) years ago already signaled an
ontological turn on principle. Latour has remained faithful to it and to
the politics that derives from it. The second interpretation discussed by
Sanz Merino is John Law’s and Graham Harman’s claim that with Politics
of Nature Latour has taken a normative turn. For her, in focusing on science
in the making as sociopolitical intervention, ANT’s descriptivism depicts
science as a performative activity. Hence, the political epistemology out-
lined in Politics of Nature is not a fresh orientation, political and normative,
but the consequence of Latour’s initial ontological turn. This epistemology
describes the collectives involved in controversial topics, and the associated
distribution of powers. It encourages the practice of diplomatic anthropol-
ogy in situations of collective experimentation, which stimulates commu-
nication in decision making. The intervention of political epistemology
proceeds from loyalty towards ANT, its amodern concepts and ontological
turn on principle. Sanz Merino concludes that from the outset Latour’s
project has been political throughout.

In his article “Actor Network Theory and Sensing Governance: From
Causation to Correlation,” David Chandler argues that the emphasis on tech-
nologies displaces modernist forms of politics, which generates worrying
consequences. Enabling new possibilities for governing, from the quantiﬁed
self to data analysis in schools and businesses through new sensing capacities,
new technologies of sensing are increasingly enabling politics by other
means, particularly for watching the emergence of natural hazards and the
impacts of climate change. Sensing governance, deﬁned as the governance of

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introduzione

effects rather than causation, relies on the construction of non-modern ontol-
ogies which highlight the development of new post-epistemological
approaches that put greater emphasis on the ontology of relations rather than
on the ontology of being. Chandler analyzes how correlations reveal agencies
and processes of emergence and how technologies have been deployed in this
area, providing some examples of how the shift from causal relations to
sensing effects has begun to alter governmental approaches. He argues that
sensing governance works on the surface, on the ‘actualist’ notion that ‘only
the actual is real,’ leading to obscure assemblages. Seeking to work on how
relational understandings can help in the present, this governance accepts
that little can be done to understand and to prevent problems or to learn
from problems and aspirations for transformation.

In his article “Constitutional Ecology of Practices: Bringing Law, Robots
and Epigrams into Latourian Cosmopolitics,” Niels van Dijk explores the
constitutional elements in Latour’s political philosophy, especially his
cosmopolitics. He begins by distinguishing ﬁve conceptions of politics in
Latour’s work (Realpolitik, Schwarzkist-politik, Naturpolitik, Dingpolitik,
and Cosmopolitik). Focusing on Politics of Nature and Cosmopolitik, van
Dijk discusses the model of political ecology that introduces a new bicam-
eralism to replace the modern constitution. He pleads for a constitutional
understanding and points to the practices by which constitutional achieve-
ments have historically been established through controversies. Coining the
expression “constitutional ecology of practices,” he highlights that different
practices such as politics, science, organization, and law contribute to stag-
ing ways to assemble and proceed together. Van Dijk analyzes engagement
with the practice of law, which leads to reinterpret Latour’s bicameral pro-
posal and the modern constitution as “epigrams”, cioè., practical models for
ordering contributions of different practices. Using robotics, he studies the
role of epigrams in a cosmopolitical attempt to introduce these non-human
entities in the collective. This case study allows him to explicate and discuss
elements of constitutionality in practice, Latour’s proposals, and non-modern
constitutionalism in action.

In their article “How Do Technological Systems Deﬁne Who War
Victims Are?,” María Belén Albornoz and Javier Andrés Jiménez Becerra
analyze how a software (the Inter-Institutional System of Information for
Justice and Peace) has translated and displaced politics. This application
was meant to accurately document situations of human rights violations
and to contribute to the design of public policy and the construction of
collective memory. More speciﬁcally, it was designed to deﬁne victims of
war and means of compensation from the Columbian state. Paradoxically,
it was victimizers who ended up beneﬁting from it. To understand this
unintended consequence of the technological artifact, Albornoz and

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Perspectives on Science

Jiménez study the way information was collected, organized, and negoti-
ated, and the technical and legal construction of the notion of victims of
war. As a political act, the system reﬂects the cultural values of those who
design and use it, and it becomes an aseptic mediator of historical-judicial
truth and the policy of Transitional Justice. Once black boxed, it institu-
tionalizes a way of knowing things and reproduces them in new contexts.
This case study helps to understand the sociotechnical translation of legal,
social, and historical elements, and the emergence of a new hybrid and its
power to deﬁne who is a victim and how victimizers can return to civil life.
Exercising a ritualized power, the corresponding assembly allowed society
to recognize judicial spaces as repository of memory and to shape a speciﬁc
setting up of transitional justice.

As mentioned above, the tagline “science is politics by other means” has
widely circulated in STS and has certainly given food for thought, COME
shown by the variety of interpretations found in the literature. The papers
collected here show that it is still regarded as the umbrella term that
encapsulates Latour’s work. Allo stesso tempo, they tend to indicate that
beyond the conﬁnes of science, “politics by other means” proves particu-
larly inspirational. By analogy with what political theorist Ernesto Laclau
used to say of the word “democracy,” one could argue that “politics by
other means” is a “ﬂoating signiﬁer.” Scholars gathered in this issue thus
read it through different grids and put it in relation with a range of
themes: politica, law, technology, ontology, methodology, intervention,
the military, and religion, which testiﬁes to the scope of Latour’s thought.
We hope this special issue will encourage readers to pause and rediscover
the depth and richness of this idea, and to translate these insights into new
empirical and/or theoretical research.

Riferimenti
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Favre, Pierre. 2008. “What Science Studies Do to Political Science: Reply
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