Politics of Nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy by Bruno Latour, Harvard University Press, ÂŁ16.95/$24.95, ISBN 0674013476
SOME time ago Bruno Latour visited 51¶ŻÂţ. “Ah, so this is where objectivity is manufactured,” he boomed. “I should like to watch you make it…” A couple of people, who had heard of him, put their heads in their hands and groaned. Others carried on innocently reporting newly discovered facts about the world, objectively.
Though that approach may sometimes be all very well in practice, it’ll never work in theory – philosophically or neurologically. If there were facts about a world Out There waiting patiently to be discovered, independent of the means of discovery, how could we tell?
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But whenever Science with a capital “S” declares “the world is thus”, Latour argues in Politics of Nature, it short-circuits politics and democracy. This “Science” is thus a philosophical position, not to be confused with how scientists actually do their work.
This book is a call to remake utterly political philosophy, to correct its failure to “anticipate that it would end up administering the sky, the climate, the sea, viruses or wild animals”. For example: “You want to save the elephants in Kenya’s parks by having them graze separately from cows? Excellent, but how are you going to get an opinion,” Latour asks, “from the cows deprived of the elephants who clear the brush for them?”
His answer, in part, is that scientists will represent the elephants and the cows and other non-human players in the world. They will do so tentatively and provisionally, as he maintains the sciences operate in practice.
This is much more than a reworking of politics. It is a sketch of a resolution of the perennial questions of what we know and what exists – abolishing the distinction between epistemology and ontology, in the philosopher’s jargon. It aims to be the “successor language to science and politics” that Latour promised in Pandora’s Hope (51¶ŻÂţ, 21 August 1999, p 48).
Latour, as you may have guessed, can be infuriating. But he is never boring. Politics of Nature must be difficult, because it challenges assumptions that are built into our languages, such as the hallowed distinction between “facts” and “values”. Latour traces the origin of this separation back to the 5th century BC, to Plato’s allegory of the cave whose inhabitants see mere shadows of a real world outside. It is worth reading – twice.
