Interviews
A Conversation with Bruno Latour: Introduction
When Bruno Latour suggests that you're wrong, it's difficult not to agree with him. One would think, for example, that among a small gathering of English faculty and graduate students, Professor Latour's answer to a question about poetic language—"I've never believed in the difference between figurative and literal"—would be more hotly contested. But while such a claim has the capacity to administer a shock that belies Latour's gentle, French-accented English, it also brings with it the power to cut through the easy assumptions of an entire discipline.
Occupying a "no-man's-land," as he puts it in Pandora's Hope, between the skirmishes of humanists and scientists, Latour opens a new space and disposes of the old, combative terms of the opposed cultures—the former resigned to the relativism (which he would prefer to call absolutism) of its subjectivity and the latter limited by the cold objectivity of its data. He chooses instead to resist the "purifications" on which each discipline stakes its authority: "One camp deems the sciences accurate only when they have been purged of any contamination by subjectivity, politics, or passion; the other camp [. . .] deems humanity, morality, subjectivity, or rights worthwhile only when they have been protected from any contact with science, technology, and objectivity" (PH 18). It is onto the happily contaminated middle ground that science studies returns in order to "insist and insist again that there is a social history of things and a 'thingy' history of humans" (PH 18).
Over the course of Latour's career, this insistence has been collected in numerous books, including Reassembling the Social (2005), Politics of Nature (2004), Pandora's Hope (1999), Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996), We Have Never Been Modern (1993), The Pasteurization of France (1988), Science in Action (1987), and, with Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (1979). He has also served as curator for two major exhibitions in Germany: Making Things Public (2005) and Iconoclash (2002). Latour has been honored with a wide variety of awards and is currently a professor at Sciences Po Paris.
During this conversation, which took place over lunch at Washington University in St. Louis on November 1, 2006, Professor Latour answered questions that moved the principles of science studies onto the terrain of the study of literature, questions that eventually brought the conversation around to the proposition that "literature is an objective science." What follows is a discussion of the agency of objects, the objectivity of description, and the common ground of science and a literature that is, as Latour says below, "a place where constant experiments have been provided." Participants in the conversation included, aside from Latour himself, Steven Meyer, Wolfram Schmidgen, Josh Hoeynck, Carter Smith, and Courtney Weiss. Special thanks to Steven Meyer, Wolfram Schmidgen, and, especially, to Bruno Latour for their assistance in preparing this transcript.
By Carter Smith