Bruno Latour hat aus Anlass der Schweizer Biennale zu Wissenschaft, Kunst und Ästhetik 2010 Luzern besucht. Am Rande der Veranstaltung (Context hat berichtet) ist es uns gelungen, Bruno Latour für ein Interview beim Frühstück zu gewinnen. Latour gibt uns breitwillig Auskunft; erläutert seine Theorie und sich selber und erklärt, wie man gleichzeitig kritisch sein und die kritische Tradition kritisieren kann…

Marianne: Yesterday at the conference, a subject discussed was the difference between intentional subjects – humans – and non-intentional nature. I had the impression that the concept of actants is try to overcome this distinction gap.

Latour: Yes, but „overcome“ not like aufheben, not in a Hegelian overcoming, but overcoming as dissolution. The first step to dissolve this impossible distinction is to precise that we talk about actants. It doesn’t matter if this is a computer or a human being or a star or an atom or whatever – they have agency. The second step is to look on how science is done in practice. You begin to look at the way ethnologists work with monkeys and how biologists work with microbes. Or you listen to physicists speaking about particles or astronomers about stars etc. The official discourse talks about “inert matter”. But in practice they are completely dancing, so to speak, with very elaborative agencies which have a lot of properties, which are not recorded in the official philosophy. In practice, the difference between in-animism and animism has never existed. But in theory, it is a very important thing – people will say that only humans have intention, as if this cup (deutet auf seine Kaffeetasse) would have absolutely no agency. So my experience is very simple: let’s do without the cup, let’s have this coffee without the cup. Can you do it? No. Then, this means it is an actor – I mean, it does something to your course of action and you can’t cut it, just because your philosophy says that the types of agency are absolute. It’s a very straightforward empirical question.

Sometimes there are questions which shouldn’t be overcome, they should just be ignored. If not, you fix a divide and then you imagine a solution to overcome it. That means that you have two absurdities and now you add a third.

Marianne: Do you have an explanation why this discussion has persisted for so long?

Latour: Well, because this distinction has a very important political aim, which is to establish the constitution of the whole of our western collective existence. If I was beginning to say that humans have the same intentions than a tea-cup, then this would raise up all sorts of questions – for example legal questions.

Once you have dissolved the absolute divide, there are lots of interesting questions raising about differences in types of agency. The great divide is maintained for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with practice and the same holds for the whole modernist constitution.

Stefan: You have used the word “political” quite often. What notion of politics do you have?

Latour: Politics is the organization of a common world. In western societies it organizes political epistemology. That means it organizes the distribution of power between science on one hand and human assemblies on the other. This was before ecology, before Kopenhagen and all sort of other “events” which have completely transformed this old idea of politics that speaks only about humans.

Marianne: But if we accept, that things or actants are in our politics, if, for example, we consider the brain as an object in our politics and law, this would totally destroy it.

Latour: Yes, maybe, but the brain has been in criminology from the mid nineteenth century on, or even earlier with phrenology. When you add a scientific object like the brain in a discussion, it becomes much more complicated and interesting: You have an ethicist talking about human intention in a very complex thinking and you have some silly brain scientists coming in with a very naïve reductionist idea of a brain, this is step one. Step two: the brain scientists begin to dispute with one another and the brain is very complicated, so the discussion begins to go in all sorts of directions. So now, your ethicist has become very boring with his ever same claims about human intention. The result is, that every single time when you have a scientific object in this state of affair, public or not, you get much more interesting and less closed definition of what it is to act.

I often show my students a picture I took of the biggest brain scientist meeting, which happens every two years. And there, it’s a big room with 25’000 posters. It’s so big and it’s so impossible to simplify. And the same scientist who will engage in court will write a paper in a newspaper and say “we now have a final, definitive idea about what the brain does in criminal acts”. So, if we are dealing with a science of description and not with preaching about differences, this is the sort of situation you will find.

Marianne: While studying your actor-network theory, I had the impression that if we began to unfold a network, we could, in theory extend it, unlimited in space and time. So aren’t you also practicing some holism in fact? Everything is related to everything?

Latour: Well, look at this machine (er deutet auf mein Iphone, das unser Gespräch aufnimmt). It is probably made of around 10.000 components. And yet, when it works, it works as one. Here we are concentrated on it because we want to be sure it records but if you were just calling a friend of yours, you wouldn’t even consider it as one, you would consider it as you because it will actually be just one step in the course of your action.

So, you see the multiplicity of an actant only if there is an “epreuve”, a trial. Not necessarily a breakdown but it has to be something that is empirically, I mean physically, traceable.

If you transform this into a theoretical argument, everything is connected with anything, it loses its interest completely. Because, of course, having the thing working as one, is what makes engineers work day and night. Because as long as it’s made of many parts, it doesn’t work as a technical object.

Marianne: What ontological status do the networks have, then?

Latour: Network is a purely conceptual tool. It is, what allows you to trace but it’s not what is traced. The network is just what can appear in the writing.

Marianne: I’ve heard very different opinions about your work. Can you explain why your reception is so controversial?

Latour: (Lacht) Because it’s new and original and funny and people are boring and repetitive…More serious it’s maybe because before, people had not realized that to serious science, all these things, these objects were attached. And not that many people were interested in the end of modernism – they were still thinking that we are modernizing our community. Our work, as it’s not only mine, was received that controversially because it deals with science in a way completely unorthodox at a time when politically, the end of modernism is sort of felt but not really diagnosed. I see my work as a positive diagnosis of the end of modernism. This is an irritating thing because it irritates the modern but also the postmodern.

And then, there’s another point, it’s that my work is not clearly associated with the left or the right. All of these questions about political ecology are very tricky, since with most people, the only reaction is this: left or right, progressive or reactive… Lot’s of positions in sociology can be much more easily mapped.

And then, I write clearly. And that’s a great disadvantage. If I was writing like Luhmann or Deleuze or Giddens, in such a heavy stile, I would be much more respected… And the other disadvantage is that I write in a funny way: people hate when it’s funny. If it’s funny, it can’t be serious…

Marianne: In your writings you clearly speak against a critical position in sociology. But aren’t you yourself a critic? Aren’t you also someone who shows the reality of actants behind the modernist ideology?

Latour: Yes, I think you can’t disinvent criticism. I explored this in Iconoclash, where I tried to show what it means to suspend the critical gesture. My answer would be: I try to render criticism more costly, less easily. In the eighteenth century, criticism was hard and you had to pay a high price. But now, if you are in your first seminary about Bourdieu in Lucerne, you will criticise religion, science, economy and it costs you nothing. People will proudly say “we are critical in the sense of Diderot and Kant.” But it’s not true because it costs nothing. Criticizing economy costs nothing. I try to make this more costly firstly by empirical enquiry. I don’t believe one word of critique, if I don’t get an interesting empirical description of what is criticized.

Marianne: One last question. What would you advise a student of sociology to study these times?

Latour: I think economics. Everything that makes clear, what economics is as a practice. Science is, of course, extremely interesting but in a way people don’t just encounter science. We encounter economics everywhere. And now, there is quite a rich field. Because even if there were lots of work done in history on how economics grew and expanded and grasped the world, but what we need to understand is economics are. If we don’t, politics will be continuously blocked by that.