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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and
Tangled Objects Author(s): Roger Luckhurst Source: Science Fiction
Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar.,
2006), pp.
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4 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Roger Luckhurst
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and
Tangled Objects Bruno Latour, professor at the Ecole Nationale
Superieure des Mines de Paris, has been a controversial figure in
science and technology studies for twenty-five years. His work has
hovered on the edges of critical theory in the humanities, but has
never quite been subsumed into that generic French "theory" that
Anglo- American academies tend to construct. Instead, he has helped
refashion STS in France and America, and the influence of his
Science in Action (1987) made him an important figure in the
so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular methodology,
"Actor-Network Theory" (ANT), has been extracted from this early
work, although Latour himself has until recently been reluctant to
use these terms. Since his attack on the philosophical premises of
(scientific) modernity in We Have Never Been Modern (1993),
Latour's work has developed wider ambitions. He has articulated his
project as aiming "to visit successively and to document the
different truth production sites that make up our civilisation"
(Crease 18). Having focused on the construction of truth in science
and technology and on the sociology of science, he has recently
moved rapidly through philosophy, law, religion, art (co-curating
the exhibition Iconoclash in 2002), and academic critique.1 This is
a reflection of his multi-disciplinary training-he has always
combined participant-observation anthropology with the sociology
and philosophy of science, blending empirical case studies with
contentious reformulations of method.
But this mix is also a mark of his desire to shake up the fixed
grids of disciplines formed in the university by a "modern
settlement" in which he no longer believes. Instead, Latour pursues
new and surprising assemblages of knowledge, in part because he
insists that the world is not safely divided between society and
science, politics and nature, subjects and objects, social
constructions and reality, but rather is populated increasingly by
strange hybrids-what he variously calls "risky attachments" or
"tangled objects" (Politics 22)-that cut across these divides and
demand new ways of thinking. A witty and elegant stylist, Latour
has proposed that "the hybrid genre that I have designed for a
hybrid task is what I call scientifiction" (Aramis ix). He rather
delightfully has no awareness that this was Hugo Gernsback's
original coinage, in 1929, for what became science fiction, but
then he has little to say directly about the genre, which he
passingly dismisses as "inadequate" for his method (Aramis viii).
Nevertheless, this short introduction will explore how Latour's
work can open a number of productive fronts for sf scholarship,
transvaluing generic knowledge in general, but also proving
particularly helpful in theorizing recent hybrid genre
fictions.
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 5
Of ANTs and Men. In the early part of his career, Latour's
central aim, in common with other historians and sociologists of
science, was to use various strategies to resituate science and
technology in their perceived relations to the social world.
Science, as formulated slowly in the West by the scientific
revolutions from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, was
rarely interested in its own history except as a record of error
progressively excluded from the production of truth. Social factors
only ever appear in these traditional scientific accounts to
explain error. False religious belief, smuggled into a leaky and
amateurish laboratory, produce incorrect objects like telepathy or
ESP; false ideological biases create instances like Lysenkoism.
Once these social intrusions are excluded, falsehood is eliminated
and the proper path to truth is regained. Good science is therefore
beyond any social influences. This divide of social and technical
knowledge produces, for Latour, a damaging political configuration.
The social practice of Western democracy is always limited by an
absolute out- side-Nature-to which only the scientific expert has
privileged access, and whose facts are beyond dispute. One can have
as many different cultural accounts as one likes, but this
multiculturalism is only ever flotsam on the sea of mononaturalism.
The overlaid binaries of social/scientific, political/natural,
subject/object, value/fact work, Latour claims, "to render
ordinary, political life impotent through the threat of
incontestable Nature" (Politics 10).
Latour developed three early strategies to contest this modern
scientific constitution. The first derived from anthropology. His
first book, Laboratory Life (a collaboration with Steve Woolgar
[1979]), was the product of two years of participant-observation in
an American laboratory. Reversing the usual direction of the
anthropologist from center to margin, and directing the scientific
gaze at science itself, Latour absorbed himself in the "tribe" of
laboratory scientists to collect fieldwork on the "routinely
occurring minutiae" of everyday laboratory behavior (Lab Life 27).2
The material collected contested the image of the laboratory as a
sterile, inhuman place, showing that the practice of science
"widely regarded by outsiders as well organised, logical, and
coherent, in fact consists of a disordered array of observations
with which scientists struggle to produce order" (Lab Life 36).
Some of Latour's central claims emerged from this work. The
laboratory is a place saturated with the social and political, and
the technical cannot be artificially divorced from these concerns,
at least in the process of doing science. The divide is instituted
later, for instance in the retrospective reconstruction of
laboratory practice in the scientific research paper. Those
incontestable scientific facts or essences are not waiting to be
uncovered, but are the end result of long and laborious procedures
that are messy and confusing.
Yet Latour's point is misunderstood if he is seen as merely
arguing for the social construction of science. He develops a
critique of semioticians who uphold an absolute divide between
world and word, reality and language. Latour argues that the
laboratory is a "configuration of machines" (Lab Life 65), a
multiple, overlapping set of tracking devices that transcribe and
translate material substances into grids, graphs, logbooks,
codings, diagrams, equations, and language. The cultural relativist
might say that the objective reality referred
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6 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
to is an end product of these transcriptions, but Latour will
later develop the point that in this complex array of inscription
of the real into signification, "we never detect the rupture
between things and signs and we never face the imposition of
arbitrary and discrete signs on shapeless and continuous matter"
(Pandora's Hope 56). Latour wants to challenge the rejection of
social and cultural factors in science, but he is equally concerned
to reject facile accounts that reduce everything in science to
social construction or matters of representa- tion and
interpretation. For Latour, this merely reverses the polarity of
the insidious object/subject divide, and his later work aims to
think about a new dispensation that cuts across this, by talking
about alliances of humans and nonhumans (see next section,
below).
Latour continues to use the methods of fieldwork, suggesting
that it can open multiple fronts of critique in addition to "la
tradition philosophique des commen- taires de texts" (Monde Pluriel
6; "the philosophical tradition of textual commentary"). The second
strategy of contestation comes from the history of science.
Scientific practice is often presentist, proceeding by the erasure
of incorrect assumptions, rival hypotheses, and wrong turns. A
general tactic to resocialize science has been to recover the
social of history of truth (to use Steven Shapin's phrase). This
historicist tactic looks at exemplary instances of the
institutional and ideological formation of scientific naturalism,
scientific controversies (treating "winners" and "losers"
symmetrically), or instances of lost or abandoned theories. Latour
borrowed much of the method of the English historians and
sociologists of science sometimes called the Edinburgh School, and
published The Pasteurization of France in 1988.3 In this study,
Louis Pasteur's genius is analytically decomposed: he is no longer
the heroic discoverer of the microbial transmission of disease
against unenlightened rivals in the mid-nineteenth century, but is
the master of strategically combining his laboratory findings with
a vast array of different elements and interests that stretch far
beyond his closed vacuum flasks. In order for his theory to win
out, Pasteur binds together a set of interests that include
farmers, army doctors, Louis Bonaparte, hygienists, newspapers,
French nationalism, the bureaucrats of the Second Empire, cows,
industrialists, popular and specialist journals, transport experts,
and the French Academy, as well as the microbes themselves. This
sort of sociological history of science has become very familiar
(it has partly dislodged the heroic, internalist scientific
biography, for instance). Yet the apparently chaotic listing of
Pasteur's interests, breaching all apparent categorization or
ordering, has become Latour's signature device. Elsewhere, he lists
some of the interests at play in the crisis around the outbreak of
"mad cow disease" in Europe, including the European Union, the beef
market, prions in the laboratory, politicians, vegetarians, public
confidence, farmers, and Nobel prize-winning French scientists.
"Does this list sound heterogeneous?" Latour asks. "Too bad-it is
indeed this power to establish a hierarchy among incommensurable
positions for which the collective must now take responsibil- ity"
(Politics 113). This listing is the mark of Latour's third strategy
to contest the modern scientific settlement: the actor-network.
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 7
The Pasteurisation of France is the book-length concrete example
that enacted the theory worked out in Latour's most important early
book, Science in Action (1987). In this, Latour traces how a
scientist might succeed enough to make a proposition into a "black
box," a statement fixed as an uncontested scientific fact, with any
history of contest or controversy in its production completely
erased. He starts with the small-the rhetoric of the scientific
paper-and builds a model that incorporates more and more elements:
the laboratory, colleagues, funders from industry, government, or
the military, machines, technology transfers, other sciences, the
educated public, the uneducated public, the press, and so on. As
before, the aim is to show that science is thoroughly socialized
and produced through "heterogeneous chains of association": "We are
never confronted with science, technology, and society, but with a
gamut of weaker and stronger associations" (Science in Action 100-
101). Although this deliberately intermixes elements, Latour is
careful to argue that a successful statement also needs to form a
disciplinary structure, a policed realm of experts and expertise,
an inside and an outside. He does not break down the conditions for
rigorous scientific knowledge; however, inverting received wisdom,
he claims that "the harder, the purer the science is inside, the
further outside the scientists have to go" (Science in Action 156).
There is no such thing as "pure" science, because these are the
laboratories that have to seek the most funding, the most
governmental and industrial support. Big technoscience only
survives by connecting itself to the state and the military:
"technoscience is part of a war machine and should be studied as
such" (Science in Action 172). Science is therefore successful not
to the degree that it isolates itself from society, but to the
degree that it creates networks and multiplies connections, and to
the extent that it can be assessed by "the number of points linked,
the strength and length of the linkage, the nature of the
obstacles" (Science in Action 201). The starkest symbol of Latour's
rejection of asocial theories of science is how he presents the
equation or formula: the purest, compressed statement of
incontestable and unchanging fact to some, the equation is for
Latour a knot, something that succeeds because it is so well
connected, tightly binding together as it does the maximum
heterogeneous elements into a single enunciation.
The network is figured by Latour through metaphors of knots and
loops. One of his most lucid expositions of what elements need to
be addressed when considering any scientific concept (a term he
often replaces with "knot") is a passage in Pandora's Hope (1999).
Building on the assertion that " [t]he truth of what scientists say
no longer comes from their breaking away from society, conventions,
mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the
circulating references that cascade through a great number of
transformations and translations" (Pandora 97), Latour lists the
five minimal loops that need to be traced: first, mobilization of
the world, which is the complex, variegated set of processes for
transporting objects from the real world into scientific discourse;
second, autonomization, which is the way a discipline moves from
amateur to professional, forming its own criteria and expertise for
scientific knowledge along the way; third, alliances, which reverse
autonomy since here
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8 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
diverse, extra-scientific interests are "enrolled" in the
support of a particular science (kings in cartography,
industrialists in chemistry, the military in atomic physics, and so
on); fourth, public representation, since "scientists who had to
travel the world to make it mobile, to convince colleagues to lay
siege to ministers and boards of directors, now have to take care
of their relations with another outside world of civilians:
reporters, pundits, and the man and woman in the street" (Pandora
105); finally, the knot of the scientific concept itself, harder to
study yet part of this topology because it is "a very tight knot at
the centre of a net" (Pandora 106).
These ideas helped form Actor-Network Theory. This is not solely
identified with Latour, and its origins are often ascribed to a
joint paper Latour wrote with Michel Callon in 1981, entitled
"Unscrewing the Big Leviathan." ANT has since been taken up by some
English sociologists, such as John Law, who sees its value in the
productive tension between the centered actor and the decentered
network, enabling the critic to move across different scales of
explanation.4 Subsuming Latour into the familiar post-structuralism
of Lyotard and Deleuze/Guattari, Law regards ANT as "a semiotic
machine for waging war on essential differences" (7). Latour has
been rather more circumspect: he has registered his suspicion of
the terms Actor (he prefers the term actant, since this might also
include nonhumans), Network (which risks becoming a dead metaphor,
a static topology or grid rather than something dynamically forged
by science in process), and Theory (which Latour claims to avoid as
it would constrain his ethnomethodology of following actors in each
fresh situation). He even suspects the hyphen between Actor-Network
as fixing a binary between individual agency and systemic forces
that he wished to displace (see "On Recalling ANT"). Latour has not
been able to kill off the term-a lesson perhaps that a single actor
cannot necessarily control the network-and has more recently
embraced it fully, publishing Reassembling the Social (2005), his
first introductory exposition of ANT. For Latour the "main tenet"
of ANT "is that the actors themselves make everything, including
their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own
metaphysics" ("On Using ANT" 67).
All of Latour's work in Science in Action and beyond might seem
an aggressive, counter-intuitive sociological theory of science,
intent on dethroning scientific legitimacy. In fact Latour claims
it is a form of almost naive realism: as his comments about ANT
suggest, he claims he has imposed nothing, but has merely followed
scientific actors themselves, tracking how they behave, and the
connections and networks that they create. Embedded in all of
Latour's work is a strong critique of sociological and critical
schools that seek "social explana- tions" of science. Latour does
not wish to fashion explanations that decode what his actors do. He
is opposed to the attempt to demystify or expose "real" conditions
as a Marxist might, and distances himself from sociologies that
have the arrogant belief that they can explain the actors any
better than the actors themselves. For Latour, the social as a term
of explanation needs to be rethought: it is not a sort of ether
that invisibly permeates everything else as a hidden context, but
is the result of the associations or links that bind together
scientific, political, cultural, economic, and other practices. He
appeals to a
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 9
"sociology of associations" to replace all critical sociologies
that use predeter- mined categories for determining social groups.
Each social object is a specific set of associations that produces
its own terms of analysis.
This approach has the pragmatist's air of the distrust of any
system, and indeed Latour has more than once appealed to the work
of William James to support his own position. Yet pragmatism can
often be a faux-naif stance, designed to disable critics. Latour's
work has undoubtedly become more explicitly political, and he has
taken aim at the political conservatism inherent in the ideological
construct of Science wielded in the Science Wars of the 1990s. In
Politics of Nature (2004), Latour wants to liberate the practice of
the (lower case, plural) sciences from the ideological stranglehold
of (capitalized, singular) Science. This will accomplish nothing
less than the revitalization of democracy, and may even solve the
clash of fundamentalisms between East and West, as explored in his
reaction to the events of September 11, War of the Worlds
(2002).
This peace-making desire is perhaps a response to Donna
Haraway's observation that Latour's method and view of scientific
practice in Science in Action was insistently war-like: science
works by strenuous battles to "win" controversies and outflank
rivals, to marshal armies, and so on. The heroic, masculinist
narrative of science was being unwittingly repeated by Latour: "The
story told is told by the same story" (Modest_Witness 34). This is
acute: after all, the French title of Latour's book on Pasteur
might have been more literally translated as lThe Microbes: War and
Peace. Yet Latour's irenic turn in the 1990s is attributable not
just to Haraway's critique, but also to the influence of the French
philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres, who in a book-
length interview with Latour spoke of working "in a spirit of
pacifism" against the contest of the faculties (Serres 32).
Finally, though, his turn to the political was driven by the
challenge Latour mounted in We Have Never Been Modem to the war set
up between subjects and objects by the modern settlement. Let's now
turn to this important polemical intervention. The Modern
Settlement and Latour's Nonmodernism. From his early books, we
already have a sense that Latour regards the scientific revolutions
of the seventeenth century as a very particular organization of the
world. This is formulated as the modern constitution or settlement
in We Have Never Been Modem, a separation of Nature and Culture
into two distinct ontologies; according to Latour, modernity works
obsessively at "purification," the categorizing of the world
according to a binary that sorts humans from nonhumans, subjects
from objects. A politics emerges from this dispensation that is
inflexible and often violent: nature is to be dominated; other
cultures, refusing to accept the disciplining of the progressive,
linear time of modernity, are regarded as objects, sunk in nature.
Savages and superstitions mix the social and the natural
indiscriminately; science progressively separates these spheres.
"Modernisation consists in continually exiting from an obscure age
that mingled the needs of society with scientific truth in order to
enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what
belongs to atemporal nature and what comes from humans" (We Have
Never 71).
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10 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
For Latour, this modem constitution has always operated
imperfectly: it is involved in a "double creation of a social
context and a nature that escapes that very context" (16), and yet
regards Nature (the guarantor of scientific truth) as pre-given and
extra-discursive. If Nature and Culture are co-produced, however,
they are in constant contact and dialogue, conducting endless
translations and mediations. The fury of purification is driven by
a secret history of miscegena- tion, of the intermixing of
categories. We have never been modem. Latour argues that this
realization has been thrust on us by recent developments that
confront us with a rapid proliferation of hybrid objects that
confound modem categories. Are ozone holes, global warming, AIDS,
epidemics of obesity and allergy, hospital superbugs, Asian bird
flu, and mad cow disease the product of natural or cultural, human
or nonhuman, processes? They cannot be "sorted"-categorized or
resolved-in any straightforward way. Indeed, in the case of global
warming, the passage to black-boxed fact is continually frustrated
and scientific argument inextricably intermingled with political,
industrial, ecological, and myriad other interests. We have moved
from "matters of fact" to "matters of concem," situating the
practice of science in wider networks and longer chains of
association.
This transition has been discussed by some critics as the
passage from an era of Science to one of Research, a move from
autonomy to the imbrication of science, culture, and economy: "all
these domains had become so 'intemally' heterogeneous and
'externally' interdependent, even transgressive, that they had
ceased to be distinctive and distinguishable" (Nowotny et al. 1).
Latour sees it as the recognition of the very hybridity that was
always induced by the modem settlement. Hybrid objects "have no
clear boundaries, no sharp separation between their own hard kemel
and their environment," he expands in Politics of Nature: "They
first appear as matters of concern, as new entities that provoke
perplexity and thus speech in those who gather around them, and
argue over them" (Politics 24, 66). He suggests we need a
re-formulation of the binaries that recognizes this increasingly
populous excluded middle, a space in which we need to grasp the
"nonseparability of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects " (We Have
Never 139). This would in turn produce a new constitution and
therefore a new politics: "It is time, perhaps, to speak of
democracy again, but of a democracy extended to things themselves"
(We Have Never 141).
Latour's polemic appeared at the time when many critical
accounts of modemity were being produced under the umbrella of
postmodernism. Some of his formulations might look
postmodern-perhaps most obviously the idea that abandoning the
linear time of modernity will open up multiple, co-existent times.5
Yet Latour is scathing about the postmodern turn. Whether it is
Jean- Francois Lyotard's collapse of metanarratives into the
"petits recits" of incommensurable language games or Jiirgen
Habermas's argument against the postmoderns for a return to
separate spheres of knowledge, Latour considers these as desperate
rearguard actions to maintain the purification that dominated the
modern settlement. The modish Jean Baudrillard exemplifies for
Latour a pointless picking over the ruins of the modern, incapable
of conceiving any other dispensation and sunk in nihilism. In this
decadent phase, Latour worries that
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 11
critique has collapsed into extreme relativism or conspiracy
theory ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" 228). He sees this as
sharing much with a regressive anti-modern view that is prepared to
annihilate all the virtues of the Enlightenment along with its
vices.
Instead, Latour declares himself a nonmodernist: "We can keep
the Enlightenment without modernity" (We Have Never 135). This
stance crucially involves making the subject/object divide far more
porous, and rethinking and extending modem humanism, which has
sorted according "to a small number of powers, leaving the rest of
the world with nothing but simple mute forces" (We Have Never 138).
The constitution needs to be reconfigured so that humans and
nonhumans are networked together in a new kind of collective. This
collective has been envisioned by Latour in Politics of Nature,
where "democracy can only be conceived if it can freely traverse
the border between science and politics, in order to add a series
of new voices to the discussion ... the voices of nonhumans" (69).
That compulsive need of the moderns to purify is not simply
dissolved (it is still helpful to have these categories), but the
nonmodernist values acts of linkage, association, and heterogeneous
assemblage:
We shall always go from the mixed to the still more mixed, from
the complicated to the still more complicated.... We no longer
expect from the future that it will emancipate us from all our
attachments; on the contrary, we expect that it will attach us with
tighter bonds to the more numerous crowds of aliens who have become
fully-fledged members of the collective. (Politics 191)
This is the mature vision of Latour's later work. Criticism of
Latour's work is often tied to methodological questions in the
sociology of science. The key objection is termed by Simon
Schaffer "the heresy of hylozoism, an attribution of purpose, will
and life to inanimate matter, and of human interests to the
nonhuman" (182). David Bloor has similarly objected, in much
harsher terms, to Latour's transgression of the foundational
philosophi- cal axioms of modern sociology (see also Elam).
Latour's defense ranges from the disarmingly honest (he suggests to
one group of interviewers that his philosophical apparatus is
really "not very deep" [Crease 19]), to the more serious view that
Bloor's sociology quintessentially belongs to the modern settlement
itself, relying as it does on the strict Kantian divorce of
subjective and objective worlds that Latour is specifically trying
to unravel ("For David Bloor"). It is of course a provocation to
talk about the "interests" or "voices"' of nonhumans, and it is in
total conflict with the hermeneutics that still dominate critique.
Yet perhaps readers of SFS are less traumatized by this move than
the philosophers of STS. Not only are we more familiar with
interdisciplinary formulations of post-humanism (for instance, in
Donna Haraway's recent attempts to articulate a "companion species"
kinship as part of a wider critique of modernity: see her "Cyborgs
to Companion Species"), but also because the fantasmatic work of sf
has been consistently bound up with imagining the interests of the
nonhuman, and has been fascinated with the production of those
hybrid forms the modern settlement would deem monstrous.
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12 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Implications for SF. I hope that this brief survey of Latour's
work has already begun to spark potential ways of reading sf, even
as his work veers across both the forms of critique and the
modern/postmodern paradigm that has tended to dominate sf criticism
in recent times. Here, I just want to sketch out the ways in which
I think Latour can enable new directions in sf scholarship.
First, it is obvious that there cannot be a Latourian theory
that can be abstracted and subsequently applied to sf, like all
those theoretical canning factories that process the raw material
of sf and turn it into the product of a particular school. Instead,
sf can be thought of as a link that can be tied into many different
kinds of chains of association or networks of influence, sometimes
in surprising or unpredictable ways. This is how it appears in
Latour's own Aramis, his "scientifictional" study of a
revolutionary transport project for Paris that failed in the 1980s.
As Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint explore later in this issue, Aramis
is presented in a cacophony of voices: political, industrial,
financial, and technological interest groups are cited directly,
interspersed with a dialogue between a cynical professor and a
naive STS student; this cacophony is in turn cut across by
fragments of a theory of technology, along with lengthy citations
from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley's proto-sf text helps
Latour imagine the way in which large technoscientific projects are
stitched together with improvised elements, which can then escape
designed intentions and develop their own "nonhuman" actions. This
mythic structure was also in the minds of many different
participants in the Aramis case: it was formative, rather than
secondary or reflective. Sf might appear like this in other
stories: for example, in the oft-told way that the genre
contributed formatively to the military-scientific-industrial
production of the nuclear bomb. H.G. Wells's The World Set Free
(1914) was one of the important links in Leo Szilard's ardent
political campaigning for an American atomic program; Wells was
then hooked into a very different (and in the end weaker) network
of resources for the atomic scientists lobbying to stop first-use
of the bomb, and then for world government after first-use.
We might also think in Latourian ways about the weird networks
of connections that produce science-fictional religions-one of the
more striking phenomena associated with the genre since 1945.
Hubbard's Dianetics took resources from experimental psychology,
the discourse of the American engineer, space-opera plots, and John
W. Campbell's messianic belief in the socially transformative
potential of sf. The Raelian group similarly binds together
genetics and cloning with an eschatology borrowed from Arthur C.
Clarke. These networks of association might be weak, thinly
populated, and definitively marginal, but Latour allows us to read
how these bizarrely heterogeneous formations operate. The complex
socio-politico-scientific embeddedness of sf could be considerably
clarified by Latour's approach to networks and assemblages, chains
of weaker and stronger association that cut across science,
technology, and society.
Second, and consequently, the dynamic topology of the network
does something to displace the static topographies of center and
margin or high and low. It is not necessarily useful to dissolve
these categories entirely (there is a
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 13
certain rigidity to the economics of genre publishing, after
all), but they might be regarded as less finally determining for
sf. Instead, the genre might be seen to intermix more dynamically,
making weaker or stronger associations across the matrix of
cultural power. Sometimes sf becomes a privileged lens through
which a lot of social processes can be translated for the wider
culture-as in cyberpunk in the 1980s (just at the time when sf
writers such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle successfully
connected into the circuits of the New Right Reagan
administration). At other times sf remains marginal, decoupled from
mainstream cultural formations and with few kudos. This marginality
can of course sometimes generate genuine subcultural energy (as in
the American political satires of the 1950s or the writings of the
British Boom in the 1990s, for instance).
This approach would also be interested in the hybridizations of
different genres that Gary Wolfe has called "the postgenre
fantastic" or "genre implosion"-the mixes of Gothic, thriller,
detective fiction, fantasy, and sf that have proliferated in recent
years. Sf criticism has been somewhat obsessed with purification,
with the kind of sorting and rigid categorization Latour argues is
typical of the modem settlement. Criticism, instead, might be much
more interested in cross-fertilizations between genre and
mainstream writing and might judge generic transgressions less
punitively. If we read the history of sf as nonmodernists, it might
then appear that the genre has never been mod- ern-that it was
never a pure form and has produced little except "hybrid" writings
(a position I tried to argue in my book Science Fiction). This may
involve dispensing with some of the subcultural ressentiment that
still attends the genre. Purism is isolationism, which means fewer
connections and therefore weaker cultural influence.
Third, Latour's sense that we live a world of proliferating
hybrids might actually help us read recent sf. Several instances
spring to mind. China Mieville's New Weird is a fusion of English
Gothic, dark fantasy, and sf traditions, and his fictions are
frequently organized around spectacular set-pieces of hybrid
creatures that cut across received categorizations. The
ichthyscaphoi in Iron Council (2004) is "a mongrel of whale-shark
distended by bio-thauma- turgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate
shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protruberant
like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a
dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely" (454). This clatter of
adjectival over-determination is Mieville's principal strategy, and
reads very much like one of Latour's lists of heterogeneous
elements, combining human, animal, and machine. A similar
fascination with hybrid beings and transformed modes of
categorization informs Justina Robson's Natural History (2003).
Yet reading sf by means of Latour does not privilege those
hybrid forms usually associated with softer sf. Indeed, Latour's
insistent focus on the social and political connections of science
and technology also means he is illuminating in reading much harder
sf traditions. An exemplary text in this regard might be Paul
McAuley's White Devils (2004), which is typical of certain trends
in many ways. The generic location of McAuley's novel is extremely
difficult to determine: it continues the author's move from space
opera to crossover
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14 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
technothriller. It is a breathless and kinetic low
entertainment, but one studded with contemplative passages that
resonate with Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Wells's Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896), and it contains the exorbitant violence of
the John Webster revenge tragedy from which it takes its name.
McAuley also slices through the distinction between "hard" and
"soft" sf. White Devils is undoubtedly hard sf: it is the kind of
book that wants to teach the reader the distinction between
mitochondrial and genomic DNA, and its imaginary sciences are
extrapolated from current biotech research. Yet it is also
fascinated with subjectivity and traumatic breaches of human
identity, the kind of material long identified with soft sf. The
hybridization of these traditions refuses to continue a long
factional war-but refuses, in Latourian terms, precisely because of
the production of new hybrids that require a reconfiguration of the
subject/object or human/nonhuman divide.
White Devils explicitly thematizes how Science has given way to
an era of Research, presenting a messy and confused world where the
laboratory is inextricably mixed with politics, aid agencies, and
"open-source late-stage capitalism" (141). The pure scientist is
described as a "relict species.... You exist in a marginal
environment. Always you must struggle for funds, scraps of
endowments, sponsorship, and always you must work harder for less
and less.... The nineteenth-century culture of science's Golden Age
... was destroyed" (314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for
heavily capitalized illicit research, released from any regulation
or ethics. It has resulted in the prolifera- tion of hybrid objects
and new actants that cannot easily be sorted according to the modem
settlement. The pandemic of the "plastic disease," for example,
results from gene manipulation, so that insects transport material
originally designed to make hydrocarbons in plants: "in the last
stages of the disease, the victims are turned into grotesque living
statues, paralysed by hard, knotty strings and lumps of polymer
under their skin and muscles" (24). The inability to distinguish
human and nonhuman is what drives the thriller plot, these terms
regularly and feverishly inverting. Are the white devils human or
genetic reconstructions of pre-human hominids? What happens when
researchers actively seek to dethrone human priority, cloning
extinct rivals? One protagonist tracking down the white devil
"atrocities" is discovered to be less human than thought, and the
terrain of the Democratic Republic of Congo is full of
monstrosities. Yet the monsters at the core of the tale prove more
human than some of their pursuers. In this, there is another
revision of the sensibility that sustained Conrad or Wells: in a
world of hybrids, there can be no monsters. Although Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay has argued for a postmodem grotesque, where
"anomalous deviations ... are norms" (72), it may be that the
horror of transgression that has powered the Gothic and the
Grotesque would have to be wholly reconceived once the modem
obsession with sorting, categorizing, and purifying has been
displaced.
Another set of texts that virtually enact Latour's insistence on
networks and tangled objects is Kim Stanley Robinson's ongoing
series about the science and politics of global warming, which so
far includes Forty Signs of Rain (2004) and Fifty Degrees Below
(2005). Latour has used global warming as an instance
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 15
where "matters of concern" supersede "matters of fact. "
Robinson's books stage the disputes over evidence of climate change
and the attempts of scientific researchers, political advisors,
laboratory workers, funding bureaucrats, senators, mathematic
modelers, displaced Tibetans, traumatized sociobiologists, and
others to persuade a Republican government to acknowledge the
crisis in the midst of extreme weather events. What heterogeneous
alliance can be forged against the hegemonic bloc of rapacious
capital? The strategy of forming alliances and networks that cut
across diverse and heterogeneous sites is explicitly worked out in
the novels; the pleasingly odd central character begins as a
reductive sociobiologist, but develops an understanding of the
politics of science that values the need for "impure" connections,
making diverse and surprising links. With work like this from
so-called "hard" sf (one might further include Gregory Benford or
Greg Bear as writers modeling the associative networks of science),
the modern dispensation that sustained the distinction between hard
and soft within the genre may be largely superseded, as the social
and the scientific find themselves continually imbricated. Thinking
about their work through Latour would demand this supersession as a
redundant dispensa- tion of the modern constitution.
It may be, then, that Latour's work is useful not only as yet
another critical resource to overlay onto fiction but also as a
useful guide to articulating the hybridity of recent sf. It links
sf into a network of associations that registers a transformation
of scientific authority in the contemporary world, helping to
explain why sf has become such a vital node in the collective for
thinking through our contemporary matters of anxious concern.
NOTES 1. For law, see La Fabrique; for religion, see Jubiler;
for art, see Latour and Peter,
Iconoclash; for recent commentary on critique, see "Why Has
Critique Run Out of Steam?"
2. Latour trained first as an anthropologist, doing fieldwork in
the Ivory Coast. He has spoken about the influence of Marc Auge on
the attempt to create a "symmetrical anthropology"-that is, one
that does not presume superiority of West over East or observer
over observed, and that can employ anthropological method
reversibly (see Latour, Un Monde Pluriel).
3. Work from the Edinburgh School (now long dispersed) includes
that of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Latour has translated a
number of works of English sociology and history of science into
French, but has ongoing methodological disputes with a number of
English counterparts, most recently with David Bloor: see Bloor's
"Anti-Latour" and Latour's reply, "For David Bloor." A helpful
starting point is Schaffer's lengthy review of Latour's
Pasteurisation of France.
4. John Law also runs the Actor Network Resource website; see
< http://www.lancs. ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm
> .
5. In fact, this borrows heavily from Michel Serres's arguments
for a multi- temporality that confounds conventional
historiography: "An object, a circumstance, is polychronic,
multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, with
multiple pleats" (Serres and Latour 60). For Serres, this is part
of a simultaneity of widely distributed historical resources that
entirely refuse any of the kinds of ruptural narrative
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16 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
usually associated with postmodernism. For more conceptual links
between Serres and Latour, see Laura Salisbury's essay in this
issue.
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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION 17
. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter.
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ABSTRACT This essay introduces the work of controversial
historian and philosopher of science and technology, Bruno Latour.
It suggests that his theories of hybrid objects, his analyses of
networks that criss-cross normally discrete categories of science,
politics, and culture, and his displacement of the
modern/postmodern paradigm can offer productive new readings of
science fiction, permitting critics to rethink the genre's relation
to science and society. Latour's own "scientifictions" (his
coinage) are examined alongside works by sf authors China Mieville,
Paul McAuley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Article Contentsp. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p.
14p. 15p. 16p. 17
Issue Table of ContentsScience Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1,
Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp.
ii+1-208+iiiFront Matter [pp. ii-ii]Introduction [pp. 1-3]Bruno
Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects
[pp. 4-17]Manuel Castells's Technocultural Epoch in "The
Information Age" [pp. 18-29]Michel Serres: Science, Fiction, and
the Shape of Relation [pp. 30-52]Friedrich Kittler's
"Aufschreibsystem" [pp. 53-67]Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in
the Works of Philip K. Dick [pp. 68-88]Final Frontiers:
Computer-Generated Imagery and the Science Fiction Film [pp.
89-108]Bodies That Matter: Science Fiction, Technoculture, and the
Gendered Body [pp. 109-128]Learning from the Little Engines That
Couldn't: Transported by Gernsback, Wells, and Latour [pp.
129-148]Review-EssaysReview: A Huge Ellipsis [pp. 149-155]Review:
Barsoom Bonanza [pp. 156-160]Review: A Cultural History of a Hybrid
Genre [pp. 161-173]
Books in ReviewReview: Transformations [pp. 174-175]Review: Not
Exactly the Right Stuff [pp. 175-177]Review: The Medium Is the
Monster [pp. 177-180]Review: Aliens [pp. 180-182]Review: Theories
from Elsewhere [pp. 182-184]Review: Channel Surfing in Space [pp.
184-188]Review: Speaking of Writers [pp. 188-191]Review:
Moon-Struck [pp. 191-195]Review: Some Essential and a Few
Superfluous German SF Bibliographies [pp. 195-198]Review: A Nuclear
No Exit [pp. 198-202]Books Received [pp. 202-203]
Notes and CorrespondenceUtopiales 2005 [p. 204]SF and Fantasy at
the MLA Convention [pp. 204-205]East Carolina University Acquires
Schlobin Collection [pp. 205-206]
Back Matter [pp. 207-iii]