BOOK REVIEW

Bruno LaTour, Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press 1999. viii + 300 pages + Glossary + Bibliography + Index. Paperback. $20.95. ISBN: 0-674-65336-X.

Much of contemporary philosophy of science literature splits into two very broad categories, distinguished by affinity for or repugnance of postmodernist criticism. Writers in the first category typically emphasize social constructionist/relativist/antirealist accounts of science and scientific truth; those in the second category typically advance social interactionist/objectivist/realist accounts of science and its truths. Identifiable as Continental only in origin and a rich writing style, Latour professes exasperation at his work being frequently, facilely, and quite wrongly prejudged as postmodernist. Yet, as this book carefully argues, he does not deserve being cast into the mainstream analytic tradition of Anglo-American anti-postmodernist thought either. Pandora’s Hope is LaTour’s first comprehensive effort in his two decades of “science studies” at staking out something of a middle ground—he might prefer to say an altogether different location—for a more comprehensive and accurate philosophical grasp of science than thus far has been captured in the familiar antipodes of postmodernist debate.

LaTour’s mission in this book was occasioned by a psychologist-friend’s informal query at a scientific conference: “Do you believe in reality?” This simple but stunning question, prompting LaTour’s visceral response, “Of course I do!” leads him to consider the reasons— psychological, philosophical, political—motivating it. Combining insights from previous work such as Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern, Latour sets out not only to explain how such a dramatic question came to be asked in this small Becketish scene, but he moves on into the distinctly new territory of Pandora’s Hope to sketch how a full answer to his friend requires a much longer soliloquy on epistemology and metaphysics than foreshadowed in any of his earlier work.

LaTour does draw heavily upon that earlier body of work to do his singular brand of “deconstruction” of his friend’s motives—and in a rather delightful literary fashion that evokes some sympathy for those he excoriates as framing him in the postmodernist rogue’s gallery. He casts, in fact, all soldiers of “the science wars” as blind and self-deceived conscripts of naive realism or anchorless relativism, beguiled equally by the conceptual foundation of modernism that they (by LaTour’s lights) foolishly argue about. That modernism has two distinct pillars, he insists, one epistemological and ontological, rooted in the Aristotelian tradition of subject-object modes of propositional expression, and the other political, rooted in the reason-versus-power struggle that flows from the heritage of The Gorgias. Samson-style, the book shoulders those pillars respectively in its earlier and later portions in a valiant attempt to topple them—and if not in the end successfully, at least pushing hard enough to create fissures that leave the reader wondering about the soundness of their construction.

Modernism, LaTour tells us, arose because the presumed victory of reason in The Gorgias led to a complexly politicized posturing of reason—as vested in science—against the foggy haze of nature’s appearance in experience. Modernist realism energetically waves the standard of reason—science—in victory over the fog, as postmodernist antirealism reactively champions the dense and mutable fog over the paltry flag it shrouds. Against this debate, LaTour proposes putting a stop to this us-versus-them of our “subject” scientific reason and “object’s” obdurate nature, and posits a new, singular object of consideration—“the collective” of all that is known to exist. (The reality of which, by the way, is the foundation of why “we have never been modern.”)

It is in exposition of this crucial term that the reader (especially an analytically-trained one such as this reviewer) may best grasp the manner in which LaTour wishes to rebuild the epistemic and ontological foundations of science—and thus lay the foundation for the titled Hope for the future of science that is left behind after science is emptied of modernist and postmodernist evils. Above all, the collective is an ontological category gathering together human and nonhuman elements of the world into an interactive and vital whole, disposing of the need for supposing that isolated minds search in vain for a way to connect to objects that are wholly other in nature. In two chapters examining the work of Pasteur on fermentation, LaTour places Pasteur, his ferments, his chemical-theory critics, and the yeast itself into an ongoing interactive process of the march of science that begins with the old orthodoxy of lifeless chemical explanation of fermentation and ends with yeast the accepted, real, and quite living culprit. The yeast is touted therein as much a participant as its (and Pasteur’s) nemesis Liebig, thus placing nonhumans on a par with scientists in ontological importance. An earlier chapter does much the same thing with the French physicist Frederic Joliot, the Nazis, Geiger counters, and neutrons, explaining how each, with nationalist interests (for some) and propensities for absorption in heavy water (for others), contributed to the eventual facts of fission, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and power stations.

This idea of the collective involves epistemological corollaries as well. In one early chapter LaTour follows a botanist, pedologist, and geomorphologist as they study a Brazilian savanna-forest border in order to establish which is advancing. As they gather evidence from plant species, soil consistency, and the like, the scientists interact with one another and the site itself as they decide what to sample and study, finally carting small bits of the forest and grassland away to labs where they further abstract that evidence into pictorial and textual representations. Throughout LaTour follows them—the collective of humans and nonhumans—in order to show how the final conclusion (the forest is encroaching on the savanna) is communicated to the larger scientific community through what he dubs “circulating reference,” in which the truth-value of the final claim is a function of a complex and living process of connection and flow that involves every step of action, every participant, every disjuncture of conveyance of the Brazilian site to the world beyond (with reverse flow as well). His very device of communication of this process is cleverly and self-consciously a case of circulating reference itself, replete with pictures, descriptions, and didactic diagrams (which LaTour seems particularly fond of throughout the book) that push his thesis along to the reader, offering as well an opportunity to backtrack and test that thesis for consistency and coherence, presumably in much the same way as science uses circulating reference to correct and check itself.

For all of LaTour’s gift for turning an original phrase—which, measured against this reviewer’s diehard love of clever delivery, is considerable given the number of times I found myself laughing during a course of serious argument—and his novel approach to get to the bottom of things, within only a couple of chapters I had the very distinct feeling that some of this was vaguely familiar to me. And then, on page 141 to be exact, that feeling was validated (concresced?), when the terms proposition, occasion, and the name Whitehead pounced with fierce clarity. LaTour’s displeasure with subject-object epistemology, the bifurcation of minds and mindless objects, and his emphasis on processes of interaction seemed, indeed, Whitehead reborn. (I do agree enough with postmodernists to concur that, to anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and it just so happens that my Ph.D. thesis was on Whitehead and that I have published in that area as well.) At least for this reviewer, Pandora’s Hope from that point on acquired the patina of Process and Reality (which is cited in the bibliography, although Science and the Modern World better parallels the scope and aspiration of Hope), along with some of the strengths and weaknesses that other work is heir to.

This is not to suggest at all that LaTour’s book is repackaged Whitehead, however (even if the two share a penchant for epigrammatic quotability). The co-author of Principia Mathematica could hardly have mustered the kind of subtle political sophistication within the context of his mature event metaphysics that LaTour does within his still-evolving concept of the collective. Neither does LaTour attempt in Pandora’s Hope to delineate the metaphysics and epistemology of the collective beyond the thumbnail sketch essential to his largely critical enterprise. Still, it remains clear that that old nemesis of scientific orthodoxy Whitehead has informed and inspired LaTour’s present day version of the same sort of creative philosophical renegade.

—V. Alan White