Interview with Bruno Latour: ‘I would define politics as the composition of a common world'
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(Source: The Hindu, January 4, 2011) Bruno Latour is one of France's most innovative, provocative
and stimulating thinkers and social anthropologists. Given French
Cartesian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that he is more appreciated in
the Anglo-Saxon world, where his books such as “We Have Never Been
Modern” (1993) are better known than in his native France. Jon Thompson,
the publisher and chief editor of Polity Press, London, described him
as France's most original and interesting thinker and in 2007, Bruno
Latour was listed as the 10th most-cited intellectual in the humanities
and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide.
Mr. Latour's seminal work has been in the field of Science and
Technology Studies. With his “Actor Network Theory” he has advanced the
notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed
within the laboratory. Thus scientific activity is viewed as a system of
beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices,
reconstructed, not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a
culture. Mr. Latour will be in India this week conducting workshops in
New Delhi. In this exclusive interview with The Hindu's Vaiju Naravane in Paris, he discusses the new challenges facing humanity and of India's role in the climate debate.
I wish to start this interview with a discussion of one of your most
famous books — “We Have Never Been Modern”. Could you explain what you
meant by that? What made you write this book and where do you go now?
The Great Narrative of the Western definition of the world was based on a
certain idea of Science and Technology and once we began, 30 or 40
years ago to study the practices of the making of science and
technology, we realised that this definition could not sustain the old
idea of western rationality taking, in a way the place of archaic
attachment to the past.
The Great Narrative was based on the idea of Science which was largely
mythical. Science has always been linked to the other cultures of the
Western World, although it has always described itself as apart —
separated from politics, values, religion and so on. But when you begin
to work on a history of Science — Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein,
Kantor or whoever, you find on the contrary, that things have never been
severed, that there has always been a continuous re-connection with the
rest of cultures and especially with the rest of politics.
So until the end of the 20th century the western Great Narrative was
caught in a contradiction between its practice which was constant
attachment between Science and Culture and its official description of
itself as being rational, objective, separate, as being universal in
that it operated everywhere in the same way. Now what is interesting
from the Indian perspective is that the whole discourse about
modernising or not modernising, about progressing or not progressing,
between being archaic or not, was based on the baseline shibboleth
provided by this idea of modernisation. Now if you change this baseline
and if modernisation is not what has been going on in the so-called
West, the “we” of We Have Never Been Modern, then it opens up many new
conversations between the former modernising and the former modernised.
And of course this fits very well with the large body of literature,
mainly from India on post-colonial studies.
I would like to refer to a recent essay of yours in which you say and
I quote: “… the meteorologists don't agree with the chemists; they are
talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. … The
horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is
commensurable and yet, there they are, caught up in the same story…” So
what is going on in this debate over climate change and what happens to
the role of governments?
On governments the question becomes complicated because we are now
talking about the politics of Nature and that's a rather new quandary.
Nature was not supposed to be part of anything — it was supposed to be
out there. Not in the ancient tradition where there was no separation to
begin with between Nature and society but now, when we have returned to
a most interesting position, where Nature is back in politics. However,
Nature is not able to unify the discussion so far because people are
entering into controversies about Nature. And these controversies cannot
be quashed by saying — you are not a scientist or you are not the
government or from the West or whatever, and this is a very new arena
for politics as well as for scientists and citizens. And that is the new
area I am trying to map, so to speak. But no one has answers for that.
No one has ever had to bring the climate into parliament! We are
struggling collectively and India again is very important here because
of its new role in Cancun and the climate debate.
In New Delhi you are holding talks with ecologists, engineers who
develop digital technologies with social science applications and those
engaged in both the climate change and globalisation debate from the
emerging countries' point of view. Where do you think the meeting ground
lies?
The responses have to be issue-specific, of course. But the first thing
is to have a meeting ground which is defined neither by the need of
Nature, as if Nature was able to exist universally and outside politics,
nor by defining it only by market forces, although market forces have
to be defined and organised as well. So it's more of a negative common
ground, I would say. Do we agree that the problem cannot be solved by
other than composing a common world? The composition of a common world
would be the definition of politics.
You are one of France's most original, stimulating and provocative
thinkers and yet, you are much better known and better appreciated
outside France. Do you think this has to do with France's rigid
Cartesian mindset and orthodoxy?
In France there is a specific reason. Science and Modernisation have
been so entangled from the time of the French Revolution that it is
difficult in here to reopen this question of universality, science,
colonial expansion and so on without entering into many, many delicate
and “hot” issues about identities. So the French identity has largely
been based on a certain idea of Science and expansion and all these
questions are now being debated and put into jeopardy. Everything here
hinges on a certain idea of science and it's an idea of science that I
am tackling and they don't like that too much! Of course there is the
same discourse in India where attacking Science and Technology is
considered reactionary and so forth. So the idea that there is no other
alternative, that is, if you do not talk about Science and Technology in
a “progress” mode, you are a reactionary is the same everywhere. In
India, France or America, the same temptation is there. That is now
changing because of the ecology crisis.
You have been working on the idea of eco-theology. Could you talk about that?
Given that we have to look for alternatives to the politics of Nature, I
was interested in seeing if there is in the old tradition of Christian
theology – I don't know enough about Indian tradition — about respect
for Creation. Not about Nature but respect for Creation. And it happens
that in the Orthodox Christian tradition of Central and Eastern Europe
there is a large body of theological work around the question of
Creation. My interest is that there is a disconnect between the science
and the size of the threat that people mention about Nature, the planet
and the climate and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed
to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep
pretty well. So either the threat is not that strong, or we have not
built the kind of emotion we have built for war, for religious conflict
and all sorts of other issues which make us very emotive.
Or that our fright is so great that it has numbed us …
That's also a very clear possibility and that's not a very good attitude
either, nonetheless. That's why I'm interested in seeing and checking
if there is in religious tradition where you fathom this question about
emotion about Creation. And again, India is a very interesting place for
that.
