According to Latour, just
like Tolstoy’s “great man” have unduly received the praise for big victories in
history, so are individual scientist singled out to stand for scientific
revolutions that have only been enabled, achieved its prominence and
credibility, through a complex interplay of social and scientific forces and
agents. In the first part of “The Pasteurization of France” from 1993, Bruno
Latour offers a thorough critique of constructivist sociology that tries to
explain scientific facts merely in terms of their social construction. Instead,
he emphasis that sciences can neither be reduced to its technical content nor
to its social context. Relinquishing any a priori ontological assumptions, it
has to be understood in conjunction of the two aspects that constitute and
define each other as well as the relevant actors. Through the semiotic
inspection of scientific literature Latour illustrates his thesis by means of
the seemingly indisputable achievements of French hygienist at the end of the
19. century, a victory that has come to be incarnated by one single name:
”Pasteur”. However, given Latour’s expressed desire to avoid the predefinition
of actors it is striking that the inspection of three academic journals already
presupposes a vision of which actors may be important and where they can be
found and who is to define them.
Latour argues that the hygienist
as a social movement provided the necessary space, motivation and a receptive
and uncritical audience for Pasteur’s endeavour in the laboratory. Offering the
infrastructure, they acted as a kind of translator. Especially the discourse
connecting the health of the poor with the wealth of the rich was designed to
find support in left and right circles.
The Pasteurian’s work
offered a long sought solution to the mysteries of contagiousness by shedding
light on the role of a hitherto invisible but highly influential group of social
agents, the microbes. The microbes could explain for the unintended
consequences beyond human understanding such as the import of cholera through
pilgrims. It seems that Tolstoy would use this example as a proof that things
we attribute to chance, genius or free will are simply due to our limited
understanding and proposes sciences as the means to reveal mysteries, as the
new God so to say. However, Latour shows that the adaption of sciences leads to
similar unjustified glorification of “geniuses” that Tolstoy had criticised in
Napoleon.
Moreover, he argues that
the ubiquity of the microbes required and thus justified the ubiquity health
agents to take care of them. This shows how the explanatory power of the microbes
is harnessed to reconstruct public power and social relations. In other words,
they offered to their representatives, the Pasteurians, a new source of power
and authority. As Foucault may argue the phenomena of the microbe was not
purposely created to establish certain forms of social control and domination. Rather,
it emerged more or less arbitrarily as a potential source of power and was
consequently appropriated for biopolitical purposes. What is interesting in
terms of Latour’s conception of war is that he includes non-human agents, such
as the microbes as possible wagers and enemies in war.
In this piece it remains
unclear whether Latour disagrees fundamentally with Tolstoy’s demand to submit
to sciences as the new authority. His emphasis lies on showing that from a
methodological point of view, neither social relations nor sciences can be
analysed in isolation from or reduced to the other by revealing that a variety
of social forces were paramount to give Pasteur’s findings and name the meaning
and impact that is associated with them today. At the same time, Latour does
not explicitly put the merit or objectivity of scientific findings itself into
questions.
In his more recent
lecture “War and peace in an age of ecological conflict” Latour doesn’t display
how certain scientific facts have gained their prominence through particular
ideological constellations. He is more worried about how the means of
constructivist critique are abused by contemporary climate change sceptics to
discredit what he considers to be important scientific findings about the
threatening progression of global warming. In terms of the climate change
debate the God of sciences cannot be appealed to to settle the dispute as the
sciences act as the very ground on which the battle is fought out. Indeed, in
absence of a common authority Latour describes the current state as a state of
war.
He organizes his argument
around three dividing lines: Firstly, the rationalist claim that presupposes a
scientific consensus before decisions on policy responses can follow. The climate
change debate exposes the fundamental flaw of the rationalist model that
assumes science to be capable to unify in light of objective, dispassionate,
scientific evidence. Rather, subjectivity,
biases and passion define the agenda when the scientific research is so
inextricably linked to human activities that can have themselves immediate
impact on the findings and vice versa. This point constitutes the second
division: the “anthropocene” accepting the inseparability of social and natural
factors versus the “Holocene” disposing ecological conflicts as distant and
outside of the human realm.
The last cleavage
reflects the preceding ones and puts the capacity of natural sciences to act as
a unifying authority into question. Are the disagreeing parties in a state of
war or is there a neutral referee to decide upon our disagreement? Are we in
need of politics or policies? Latour takes a clear stands on all the three
division allying with the I.P.C.C. and the urgent need to act upon it. However,
as long as we find ourselves trapped in a war about the overarching
legitimating authority it seems the necessary policy action that is so urgent
is postponed till the victory is gained. As Latour concedes there is no
“masterplan without a master”. The framework of politics needs to be
reconstituted but until this projects is realized against the powerful
capitalist interest that are willing to invest enormous amounts of money to establish
contradictory scientific data it may as well be too late. Latour’s appeal to, step
by step composition of a “common world” resembles the call of French blogger
and author Thierry Crouzet for “commonism”[1]
as an ethics of sharing. However, Couzet argues that “commonism” is to be to be realized in a capitalist framework. Yet,
maintaining the institution of private property seems to represent a
contradiction to the principle of the “commons” themselves. The Slovenian
philosopher Slavoy Zizek faces this incompatibility. Accordingly, the
fundamental issue of the capitalist system is that it is unable to deal with
not only the commons of external nature but similar those of human culture and
internal nature, such as biogenetics. What he hence proposes is a “new kind of
communism”[2]
(unlike Couzet with a traditional “u”), communist in the sense that “we care
about the commons”. Hence, what Latour does leave open is how this war is meant
to be fought and how the fundamental changes he demands in the conception of
politics can be realized. Ecological utopians, as Zizek would say, are not
those who asks for a radical change in human lifestyle and organization.
Utopians are those who sustain the illusion that we can face the issue of the
commons through gradual adaption paired with scientific progress nourishing the
enlightenment idea of nature as an object of human domination.
No comments:
Post a Comment