Vincent Le - Entry No. 3 (Latour)

Bruno Latour is perhaps most famous for arguing that the modern Enlightenment dream of bracketing off the clarity of the techno-scientific realm from the uncertainty of the political realm remains very much a dream. In THE PASTEURIZATION OF FRANCE, Latour defends his claim that we have never been modern by exposing the scientific coup d’états, victories and defeats; the medicinal militants, armies, enemies and allies; the biological battle lines; the laboratory invasions; and the epistemic frontiers, which were retroactively reduced to the singular black box of ‘Pasteurian Science’. In an almost political biography of Pasteur’s REVOLUTION from which Pasteur himself is, like Tristram Shandy, largely absent, Latour demonstrates that bacteriology did NOT become an indisputable black box by virtue of Pasteur’s experimental evidence validating its absolute Truth. Recalling Tolstoy’s narrative of Napoleon whose orders were mistranslated along the chain of commands leading to the battlefield, Latour claims that Pasteurian Science became indisputable by satisfying the interests of certain French social, political and scientific individuals, groups and classes. While it is true, then, that the French people reified Pasteur into the master signifier, ‘Pasteur’, it could not have been due to his evidence’s effectivity, because the same evidence was met with suspicion in England where the British Pasteurians had failed to form such alliances with other socio-political and techno-scientific actants. 

Indeed, however true Pasteur’s discovery was, it still only became a black box by forging alliances with other actants, all of whom translated, displaced and sublimated Pasteur’s intentions to befit their own. For instance, Pasteur was only able to form an alliance with the French hygienists because they had become the dominant scientific community in France by having, in turn, formed an alliance with the French military-industrial-congressional complex. And the military, the state and the capitalist class only did allied with the hygienists in order to regenerate, for the purposes of war and exploitation, the revolting urban masses, whose own desire to be rid of urban disease could also be met through an alliance with Pasteur. Although Pasteur was no stronger by virtue of his data and ideas than the English pasteurians, he became a black box by forging such alliances with the dominant scientific and socio-political actants who could then translate Pasteur to their own ends.

At this juncture, it is necessary to distinguish Latour from the French social constructivists who disavow the reality of an exterior world-in-itself outside of human experience. After all, Latour is not ONLY interested in the socio-political actants that influence Pasteurian Science and its reception, but also imaginary and nonhuman actants, such as the master signifier ‘Pasteur’ and the invisible microbes. For Latour, anything, whether human, nonhuman or even imaginary, are really existing autonomous entities so long as they produce effects by precisely resisting other entities’ reductive translations of them. Perhaps, then, Latour himself does not ally enough with Pasteurian Science and its hygienist allies insofar they permit us to see that society cannot explain the deviation of human intentions without taking into account previously unknown nonhuman or natural actants like microbes, animals, air, light, water, soil, and cities. Far from the modernist notion that Science enslaves nature to serve humankind’s interests, Pasteur and his allies evinced that human actants are always-already interdependent upon nonhuman and natural actants for their health and well-BEING. And far from Foucault’s conception of techno-science as a mechanism for biopolitical control, normalization and stabilization of society, what the Pasteurian National Front really did was to reformulate self-interest into a kind of Nietzschean, selfish altruism by which it is in everyone’s self-interest to look after each other’s for fear that if one falls ill, all may fall ill. 

Only as soon as Pasteurian science had opened up the black box of man and society by conferring agency to a multitude of previously hidden nonhuman actants, the hygienists mistranslated what was a A science among others into the reductive black box of Science as such. That is to say, the hygienists acted as missionaries spreading the Word of Pasteur’s discovery of the microbes that are dangerous to the social body but also invisible to it, so as to establish themselves as the necessary mediators of the microbes and the storytellers of the deviation of human intentions, war strategies, social relations, and so on. Henceforth, anyone or thing could best meet their interests by trying to identify themselves with the methodologies, functions and aims of the indisputable black box of Science, from psychoanalysis and scientific socialism, to capitalism and colonization, to analytic philosophy and feminism, and so on. By demonstrating how this black box of Science is composed of just such a massive matrix of controversies, conflicts and surprising alliances between various actants, Latour returns to a now reductive science’s initial gesture of reviving the world’s multiplicity of nonhuman actants and their translations, networks and alliances.