In a New York Times Op-Ed, a coastal geologist argued that the March for Science would “reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends.” This was what happened in the infamous 2009 incident now known as Climategate, when emails to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia, a leading center for climate research in Britain, were hacked, revealing exactly the kinds of messy debates that Latour documented in “Laboratory Life.” Climate skeptics cited this as proof that the scientists weren’t really discovering climate change but simply massaging the data to fit their preconceptions. Examples include Bruno Latour (for his work on Actor-Network Theory) and Michel Foucher, whose main contribution lies with border studies. “Can you imagine the pleasure of producing one fact?”. The relativist researcher "learns the actors' language," records what they say about what they do, and does not appeal to a higher "structure" to "explain" the actor's motivations. “I think we were so happy to develop all this critique because we were so sure of the authority of science,” Latour reflected this spring. Actors bring "the real" (metaphysics) into being. The two men collaborated on “Laboratory Life,” which after its publication in 1979 became a founding text in the nascent field of science and technology studies and, by academic standards, a breakthrough success. ». They tackled the comments with playful self-deprecation. The idea for the paper emerged after Latour told Gaillardet that the standard representations of the critical zone were “a total disaster.” In contrast to the standard image of the earth, in which the critical zone is represented merely as a thin layer, their paper proposed a new representation in which the critical zone, the most fragile and threatened area of the earth, is the center of attention. Apart from (or perhaps even because of) this last feature, he was thus in the classic position of the ethnographer sent to a completely foreign environment. We would be in a much better situation, he has told scientists, if they stopped pretending that “the others” — the climate-change deniers — “are the ones engaged in politics and that you are engaged ‘only in science.’ ” In certain respects, new efforts like the March for Science, which has sought to underscore the indispensable role that science plays (or ought to play) in policy decisions, and groups like 314 Action, which are supporting the campaigns of scientists and engineers running for public office, represent an important if belated acknowledgment from today’s scientists that they need, as one of the March’s slogans put it, to step out of the lab and into the streets. Latour, in turn, invited Woolgar to spend a few weeks with him studying his primates at the Salk Institute. The effect was a bit like watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” if Al Gore had been a coltish French philosopher who said things like “Scientists, artists, and social scientists like myself are beginning to propose what we call — and maybe it’s too exaggerated — a new cosmology.”, The idea that we can stand back and behold nature at a distance, as something discrete from our actions, is an illusion, Latour says. In Felix Stalder's article "Beyond constructivism: towards a realistic realism", he summarizes Latour's position on the political dimension of science studies as follows: "These scientific debates have been artificially kept open in order to render impossible any political action against these problems and those who profit from them". Latour’s interlocutor was not the only person who felt that the establishment of science was under attack. In the French-run engineering schools, black students were taught abstract theories without receiving any practical exposure to the actual machinery they were expected to use. At a meeting between French industrialists and a climatologist a few years ago, Latour was struck when he heard the scientist defend his results not on the basis of the unimpeachable authority of science but by laying out to his audience his manufacturing secrets: “the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.” The climate denialists, by contrast, the scientist said, had none of this institutional architecture. Latour's work Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : Essais d’anthropologie symétrique was first published in French in 1991, and then in English in 1993 as We Have Never Been Modern. Inside was the observatory’s gravimeter. Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims. The book continues to challenge some of our most deeply held notions about how knowledge is made. Latour believes that this is specious. “It changes the way that social science and earth science think.”. The three of them were gathering to discuss a paper they had written for The Anthropocene Review, a transdisciplinary journal. [31] Latour also referred to the impossibility of returning to premodernism because it precluded the large scale experimentation which was a benefit of modernism. No one had ever contested that scientists were human beings, but most people believed that by following the scientific method, scientists were able to arrive at objective facts that transcended their human origins. A la demande de bon sens : « Relançons le plus rapidement possible la production », il faut répondre par un cri : « Surtout pas ! But Latour believes that if the climate skeptics and other junk scientists have made anything clear, it’s that the traditional image of facts was never sustainable to begin with. In recent years, the 200-acre hillside forest, equipped with sensors and an array of high-tech devices, has become a site for studying the impact of climate change on water chemistry, soil content and vegetation. Along with Michel Callon and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Émile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde. The first text he was assigned was Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”; unlike “all the confusion of mathematics,” it immediately struck him as clear and perfectly rational. “But it’s also an important moment not to go back to very conventional and very bad epistemologies about how scientific knowledge is put together and why and how it holds. Can his ideas help them regain that authority today? “It was clearly a racist situation,” he said, “which was hidden behind cognitive, pseudohistorical and cultural explanations.”. Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Our Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and many other books.He curated the ZKM exhibits ICONOCLASH and Making Things Public and coedited the accompanying catalogs, both published by the MIT Press. 2 arguably better, map. “Don’t say we are manipulating facts!” he said. The relativist recognizes the plurality of metaphysics that actors bring into being, and attempts to map them rather than reducing them to a single structure or explanation. C'est dans cet objectif notamment que Bruno Latour a créé les cartographies des controverses au médialab, pour inventer le nouveau média dynamique qui permet d'explorer toutes les dimensions d'une question ("issue" en anglais). [29] Postmoderns, according to Latour, also accepted the modernistic abstractions as if they were real. He suggests that critique, as currently practiced, is bordering on irrelevancy. But what they would have missed — what they have always missed — was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. If scientific knowledge was socially produced — and thus partial, fallible, contingent — how could that not weaken its claims on reality? “I think what we’ve done with Bruno goes further than simple combination,” Gaillardet told me. Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. For Latour, to talk about metaphysics or ontology–what really is–means paying close empirical attention to the various, contradictory institutions and ideas that bring people together and inspire them to act. In 1971–1972, he ranked second and then first (reçu second, premier) in the French national competitive exam (agrégation/CAPES de philosophie). "[36], Although Latour frames his discussion with a classical model, his examples of fraught political issues are all current and of continuing relevance: global warming, the spread of mad cow disease, and the carcinogenic effects of smoking are all mentioned at various points in Pandora's Hope. Latour rose in importance[citation needed] following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar. [9] This early work argued that naïve descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice. [30] In contrast, the nonmodern approach reestablished symmetry between science and technology on the one hand and society on the other. Guillemin later invited him to study his laboratory at the Salk Institute in San Diego, and so beginning in 1975, Latour spent two years there as a sort of participant-observer, following scientists around as they went about their daily work. “Do you believe in reality?” is now the question that half of America wants to ask the president and his legion of supporters. Explore books by Bruno Latour with our selection at Waterstones.com. Instead of accusing Trump supporters and climate denialists of irrationality, Latour argues that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive. Some authors have criticized Latour's methodology, including Katherine Pandora, a history of science professor at the University of Oklahoma. Join Facebook to connect with Bruno Latour and others you may know. Still, Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality. [10] 1 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). The relativist "takes seriously what [actors] are obstinately saying" and "follows the direction indicated by their fingers when they designate what 'makes them act'". It was a clear, cold morning, and after a week of intermittent snow, the landscape was draped in white. “The way I see it, I was doing the same thing and saying the same thing,” he told me, removing his glasses. But now they are using his work. We need to show the bankruptcy of this climate controversy without closing down the fact that science is a set of situated practices and not capital-S science.”, As the assaults on their expertise have increased, some scientists, Latour told me, have begun to realize that the classical view of science — the assumption that the facts speak for themselves and will therefore be interpreted by all citizens in the same way — “doesn’t give them back their old authority.” In an interview last year, Rush Holt Jr., a physicist who served for 16 years in Congress, described the March for Science as a turning point: People, he said, were realizing “that they need to defend the conditions in which science can thrive.”, Whether they are conscious of this epistemological shift, it is becoming increasingly common to hear scientists characterize their discipline as a “social enterprise” and to point to the strength of their scientific track record, their labors of consensus building and the credible reputations of their researchers. Gaillardet wondered whether a rock could be described as an agent, and pointed out several other flourishes that were “very rare” in scientific articles, such as the literary epigraph and the fact that a whole sentence was in parentheses. Bruno Latour (born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher.Known for his work in science and technology, Latour has taught at several universities, including École des Mines de Paris, Sciences Po and London School of Economics.Latour has also authored several books, including Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991). Latour (in red ascot) with scientists at a critical-zone observatory in the Vosges Mountains. Bruno has been incredibly creative and strong in making these arguments. He later realized that it was precisely his lack of aptitude for lab work that led him to pay such close attention to the intricate, mundane labor involved in the manufacture of objectivity. By showing that scientific facts are the product of all-too-human procedures, these critics charge, Latour — whether he intended to or not — gave license to a pernicious anything-goes relativism that cynical conservatives were only too happy to appropriate for their own ends. bruno-latour.fr /node /841.html /723 /31; colporteur @colporteur CC BY-NC-SA 29/03/2020. Gross and Leavitt argue that Latour's position becomes absurd when applied to non-scientific contexts: e.g., if a group of coworkers in a windowless room were debating whether or not it were raining outside and went outdoors to discover raindrops in the air and puddles on the soil, Latour's hypothesis would assert that the rain was socially constructed. “In that sense, there is no outside anymore.” Appropriately enough, the show, which he has performed in several cities across Europe and will bring to New York this week, is called “Inside.” In our current environmental crisis, he continued, a new image of the earth is needed — one that recognizes that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere and that we are always implicated in the creation of our view. (p. 238) "Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?” asks Latour: no matter which position you take, "You’re always right!" Here is Latour's description of metaphysics: If we call metaphysics the discipline . This objection manifests the most important difference between traditional philosophical metaphysics and Latour's nuance: for Latour, there is no "basic structure of reality" or a single, self-consistent world. The question then becomes how to explore the actors' own metaphysics.[40]. From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruno_Latour&oldid=1000536727, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 15 January 2021, at 14:43. I n the summer of 1996, during an international anthropology conference in southeastern Brazil, Bruno Latour, France’s most famous and misunderstood … Latour is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). Faire ce travail, c'est tenter de faire émerger et coopérer cette opinion publique que Lippman qualifiait de fantôme. [23] Similarly, philosopher John Searle[24] argues that Latour's "extreme social constructivist" position is seriously flawed on several points, and furthermore has inadvertently "comical results.". The medical revolution commonly attributed to the genius of Pasteur, he argued, should instead be seen as a result of an association between not just doctors, nurses and hygienists but also worms, milk, sputum, parasites, cows and farms. [30] He referred to it as much broader and much less polemical, a creation of an unknown territory, which he playfully referred to as the Middle Kingdom. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). De 1982 à 2006, il a notamment été professeur au Centre de sociologie de l'innovation, professeur invité à la LSE et au département d'Histoire des sciences d'Harvard. “This is normal science. In her review of Pandora's Hope, Katherine Pandora states: "[Latour's] writing can be stimulating, fresh and at times genuinely moving, but it can also display a distractingly mannered style in which a rococo zeal for compounding metaphors, examples, definitions and abstractions can frustrate even readers who approach his work with the best of intentions (notwithstanding the inclusion of a nine-page glossary of terms and liberal use of diagrams in an attempt to achieve the utmost clarity)".[36]. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that scientific facts and entities, like cells and quarks and prions, existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scientists. ", Latour's article has been highly influential within the field of postcritique, an intellectual movement within literary criticism and cultural studies that seeks to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Although he was a wealthy and well-read Catholic, he found himself completely unprepared for the virulent snobbery of the capital. “To produce one fact!” Latour sighed, and pointed a finger in the air, as though to demonstrate its indisputable solidity. Par Bruno Latour, philosophe et sociologue. [40] Mapping those metaphysical innovations involves a strong dedication to relativism, Latour argues. In this respect, “Down to Earth” extends the sociological analysis that he brought to bear on factory workers in Abidjan and scientists in California to the minds of anti-scientific voters, looking at the ways in which the reception of seemingly universal knowledge is shaped by the values and local circumstances of those to whom it is being communicated. As Latour has long maintained, critical-zone scientists themselves — like many environmental researchers — play a part in the cyclical processes they study: Others use their research to make changes to the very environment they are measuring, in turn challenging the traditional image of scientists as disinterested observers of a passive natural world. Pandora's Hope (1999) marks a return to the themes Latour explored in Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern. Arènes realized they had to change the word “concrete,” which had a more material connotation for geologists than for philosophers. There was an ache in his eyes. [25][33] He refused the concept of "out there" versus "in here". It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science.”. 1.1 Monographs; 1.2 Selected works; 1.3 Essays; 2 Conversations and interviews; 3 Literature; 4 Links; Works . Latour had paired his usual aqua Lacoste messenger bag and burgundy slacks with a brown suede jacket, pumpkin scarf and flat tweed cap, which gave him the appearance of a Wes Anderson character. “A lot of scientists in France didn’t like him originally because he treated them like other workers, and they believed in having a special relationship to the truth. As pleasing as it might be to return to a heroic vision of science, attacks like these — which exploit our culture’s longstanding division between a politics up for debate and a science “beyond dispute” — are not going away. Day-to-day research — what he termed science in the making — appeared not so much as a stepwise progression toward rational truth as a disorderly mass of stray observations, inconclusive results and fledgling explanations. While controversial at the time, it has since been adopted as a methodological tool not just in sociology but also in a range of disciplines, like urban design and public health. As we waited, Jacques Hinderer, an amiable geophysicist, explained some of the difficulties in obtaining precise data. The tundra below, rent with fissures, reminded him of the agonized face from Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”, “It was as though the ice was sending me a message,” Latour recalled in March. Hän toimii politiikan tutkimuksen professorina Pariisin Sciences Po -instituutissa. The literary critic Rita Felski has named Latour as an important precursor to the project of postcritique. The Vosges Mountains in Alsace-Lorraine, site of a critical-zone observatory that Latour visited recently. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. [citation needed]. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory—that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. It took less than a day for Latour to realize that the premise was flawed. For a moment, Latour thought he was being set up for a joke. To maintain any vitality, Latour argues that social critiques require a drastic reappraisal: "our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget." The week after we met in Paris, Latour traveled to the Vosges mountain range in Alsace-Lorraine, two hours southwest of Strasbourg, to observe Gaillardet and other scientists at work at the Strengbach Critical Zone Observatory. Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman (1997). 9. [32], Latour attempted to prove through case studies the fallacy in the old object/subject and Nature/Society compacts of modernity, which can be traced back to Plato. It combined the flexibility of an automobile with the efficiency of a subway. Latour likes to say that he has been attuned from an early age to the ways in which human beings influence their natural environment. Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. In the 1980s, Latour helped to develop and advocate for a new approach to sociological research called Actor-Network Theory. The proposed system had custom-designed motors, sensors, controls, digital electronics, software and a major installation in southern Paris. [4] Latour said in 2017 that he is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that some of the authority of science needs to be regained. From the look of relief on the man’s face, however, Latour realized that the question had been posed in earnest. “I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as,” he later wrote of the encounter, “and his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. 240-254 in, http://www.spinozalens.nl/en/news/6/Spinozalens-2020-awarded-to-French-philosopher-Bruno-Latour, "When things strike back: a possible contribution of 'science studies' to the social sciences", "Professor Bruno Latour's Lecture on Politics and Religion: A Reading of Eric Voegelin: Bruno Latour's lecture on politics and religion", "Bruno Latour // Events // Department of English // University of Notre Dame", "Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", "The most cited authors of books in the humanities", "Bruno Latour's anthropology of the moderns", "The Spinoza Chair - Philosophy - University of Amsterdam", "L'anthropologue français Bruno Latour reçoit le prix Holberg en Norvège", Holberg International Memorial Prize 2013: Bruno Latour. Unlike most philosophers, for whom thinking is a sedentary activity, Latour insists on testing our taken-for-granted ideas about the world against the world itself. At the site, temperature-conductivity and pressure probes (like the one shown in the center) measure water parameters and hydrostatic pressure several meters underground. As Latour put it in his lecture in Strasbourg, “Everything we care for, everything we have ever encountered, is here in this tiny critical zone.” Much of his interest in the critical zone stems from his conviction that greater public understanding of it will more accurately show how climate science is made, before its hectic social dimension gets black-boxed. ", Some of Latour's position and findings in this era provoked vehement rebuttals. Latour considered his homework wistfully. Those who worried that Latour’s early work was opening a Pandora’s box may feel that their fears have been more than borne out. This was the message that the melting ice sheets were sending him. [27] Latour viewed modernism as an era that believed it had annulled the entire past in its wake. Strengbach, one of the oldest C.Z.O.s in France, was originally established in 1986 to measure the effects of acid rain. In the last two decades, he has become widely recognized as one of the most inventive and influential of contemporary philosophers, not just for his radical approach to science but also for his far-ranging investigations of modern life. [9] Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist[9] approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour has diverged significantly from such approaches. The great paradox of Latour’s life — one that is not lost on him — is that he has achieved a kind of great-man status even as so much of his work has sought to show that intellectual labor is anything but a solo endeavor. He has a full head of dark, disheveled hair, and his vigorously overgrown eyebrows sweep several unsettling centimeters up beyond the rim of his round spectacles, like a nun’s cornette. an excellent idea!) He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). The task of the researcher is not to find one "basic structure" that explains agency, but to recognize "the metaphysical innovations proposed by ordinary actors". Impressed by Latour’s dedication, Gaillardet remarked that Latour could have been a scientist. Dr. Latour is a leading figure in sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, and he is the author of numerous books, including Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern, and Reassembling the Social. In addition to his epistemological concerns, Latour also explores the political dimension of science studies in Pandora's Hope. For a few moments, Latour stood reverently before the rolling waves on the screen. He is at the center of people who want to think about the world.”. Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25. But these tremors also reminded me of Latour’s description of the earth in the Anthropocene as “an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, trembling and easily irritated envelope.” He stood before the small monitor, rapt. Reconegut pels seus treballs i activitat docent en el camp dels estudis de ciència, tecnologia i societat i per ser un dels fundadors de la teoria de l'actor-xarxa (en anglès Actor-Network Theory-ANT-). Bruno Latour er ein pionér innanfor studiar av kunnskap, teknologi og samfunn (STS). But in the end, the project died in 1987. Bruno Latour (s. 1947 Beaune, Ranska) on ranskalainen filosofi, antropologi ja tieteensosiologi. [17][18][19] The prize committee stated that "Bruno Latour has undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and has challenged fundamental concepts such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human." This, in essence, is the premise of Latour’s latest book, “Down to Earth,” an illuminating and counterintuitive analysis of the present post-truth moment, which will be published in the United States next month. “It’s beautiful that ocean waves can actually be heard in the middle of the Vosges,” he said.

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