“In the aughts, Latour had been a ubiquitous reference point for Anglophone social and cultural theory, standing alongside Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on the list of most cited academics in fields ranging from geography to art history”
“Made notorious by the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, he reinvented himself as a climate scholar and public intellectual in the last two decades of his life”
“Yet amidst the expressions of appreciation and grief, many on the left shrugged. Latour’s relationship to the left had long been fraught, if not entirely unsatisfactory to either: Latour enjoyed antagonizing the left; in turn, many leftists loved to hate Latour”
“A leading placement in the agrégation led to a doctorate in theology from the Université de Tours.”
“Twenty-one in 1968, Latour could be found not in the streets of Paris but the lecture halls of Dijon, where he studied biblical exegesis with the scholar and former Catholic priest André Malet”
“He wrote his dissertation on Charles Péguy, while working in the French civilian service in Abidjan, then capital of Côte d’Ivoire”
“There he was charged with conducting a survey on the ‘ideology of competence’ for a French development agency seeking to understand the absence of Ivoirians from managerial roles, while reading Anti-Oedipus by night”
“‘Deleuze is in my bones’, he would later claim”
“Following the ‘historical epistemology’ of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, postwar French philosophers from Louis Althusser to Foucault were intensely concerned with the status of science and truth”
“Though Latour shared this broad thematic interest, he thought historical epistemology insufficiently attentive to actual scientific practice. Consequently, his original intellectual home was not among the philosophes, but rather the foundling Anglophone field of ‘social studies of science’, which emerged from Britain’s sociology departments in the 1970s before quickly extending its influence into the United States”
“Going from the ‘laws of science’ to the lab is, Latour would later argue, like going from the law books to Parliament. It reveals not a space of rational insight but of fierce debate, controversy, messiness, mistakes – of knowledge produced by human beings rather than disembodied minds”
“Latour’s exegetical training in Dijon also informed his study: what the laboratory really produced, he argued, was texts. Scientists were constantly making and interpreting inscriptions: jotting down measurements, writing up findings”
“Every contrarian since has fancied themselves a Galileo, standing firm against the corrupt powers that be. But it is not always so clear which side nature is on, Latour observed”
“Nature does not simply speak for ‘herself’ but through spokespeople – those who measure and interpret the physical world”
“It is only after the laboratories have been built, the studies published, the papers read, that nature says anything at all”
“Constructing a fact – showing that the Earth moves around the sun, say – is a difficult task which entails a demanding set of practices. The upshot is that scientific ‘dissenters’ cannot stand alone. They can succeed only by recruiting many others: researchers, funders, publics”
“Latour’s sharp-elbowed asides about Marxism were often really directed at Althusser, whose work stood accused of reproducing the flaws of French historical epistemology more broadly: namely, an uncritical scientism and a privileging of philosophical principles over the actual practices of scientists”
“Althusserian Marxism, in its aspiration to total knowledge, was for Latour the most modernist project of all – not, in his view, a compliment”
“He was more sympathetic to the Marxist contingent of the first generation of Anglophone science studies, developed via a different formation: anchored by the British Radical Science Journal, connected to the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, and influenced by work ranging from British social history to Harry Braverman’s study of the labour process”
“The infrequently read second half of Pasteurization, ‘Irreductions’, contains a striking philosophical set piece: Latour describes driving from Dijon to Gray in 1972 when he is so beset by what he called an ‘overdose of reductionism’ that he is compelled to pull over. Gazing at the blue winter sky like Sartre’s Roquentin at the chestnut tree, ‘for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free’.”
“The lesson he draws is simple: ‘nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’.”
“Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the method he developed with Callon, formalized this position. It called for abandoning familiar explanatory categories and frameworks, and indeed the project of explanation altogether, in favour of a new approach: only describe”
“He championed the idiosyncratic and little-known French sociologist Gabriel Tarde as the preferable alternative to his far better-known contemporaries, Durkheim and Marx: ‘Imagine how things might have turned out had no one ever paid attention to Das Kapital’, his 2009 book on Tarde, co-authored with the sociologist Vincent Antonin Lépinay, began. (Latour’s efforts to spark a Tarde revival attracted few allies.)”
“Pierre Bourdieu made a particular enemy out of Latour, reportedly icing him out of the Collège de France and other prestigious halls of French academia. Latour, in turn, needled Bourdieu every chance he got, at one point comparing Bourdieusian social theory to a conspiracist reading of 9/11”
“It is hard to read Reassembling the Social as anything but an extended polemic against the Bourdieusian establishment in Paris”
“Latour’s careful attention to the labours involved in the construction of networks and the enrolment of allies might be read as a promissory manual for his own career. In particular, his ability to translate his position within the relatively small world of science studies into a droll philosophical register helped his ideas travel”
“He was particularly inspired by the philosopher Michel Serres’s dense and allusive style. Yet where Serres’s prose was notoriously difficult to translate and little read outside France, Latour proved hugely popular in translation”
“He drew on rhetorical strategies from across the disciplines: from philosophy he took dialogues; from literature, narratives and metaphors; and from science itself diagrams, which often mystified as much as they clarified”
“Critique, Latour argued, was a ‘potent euphoric drug’ for self-satisfied academics: ‘You are always right!’”
“The paradox was that the essay suggested, however subtly, that Latour himself had always been right. If antipathy to intellectual smugness often drove him to think more creatively than the narrow channels of French academia permitted, his frequent calls for humility could belie his own ambition and self-assurance”
“By all accounts a generous interlocutor in person, in print he was prone to tendentious readings of others’ work; and even as he became one of the world’s most famous academics, he continued to style himself as an outsider”
“Instead of critiquing critique, he sought to reinvigorate the project of construction, which he began to describe in terms of ‘composition’.”
“It is striking that many of Latour’s fiercest critics in recent years – most prominently the eco-Marxists Andreas Malm and Jason W. Moore – have drawn more on Latourian-inflected strains of thought than they have liked to acknowledge”
“But Latour was also right that Marxists had generally paid more attention to social relations than the likes of microbes and carbon molecules. (The late Mike Davis stands as a notable exception)”
“Rather than being tarnished by association, the vitality of their work comes from a synthesis of the strengths of Marxist thought with insights gleaned elsewhere – a synthesis that Latour himself only reluctantly and belatedly undertook in reverse”