Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects

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Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects Author(s): Roger Luckhurst Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp. 4-17 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241405 . Accessed: 20/08/2013 23:22
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SCIENCE FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Roger Luckhurst Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects
BrunoLatour,professor at the Ecole NationaleSuperieuredes Mines de Paris, has been a controversialfigure in science andtechnologystudiesfor twenty-five years. His work has hovered on the edges of critical theory in the humanities, buthas never quitebeen subsumedinto thatgeneric French "theory"thatAngloAmericanacademiestend to construct. Instead,he has helped refashionSTS in FranceandAmerica, andthe influenceof his Science in Action (1987) madehim an importantfigure in the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular methodology, "Actor-NetworkTheory" (ANT), has been extractedfrom this early work, althoughLatourhimself has until recentlybeen reluctant to use these terms. Since his attackon the philosophicalpremises of (scientific) modernity in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour's work has developed wider ambitions. He has articulated his project as aiming "to visit successively and to document the different truth production sites that make up our civilisation" (Crease 18). Having focused on the construction of truth in science and technology and on the sociology of science, he has recently moved rapidly throughphilosophy, law, religion, art (co-curatingthe exhibitionIconoclash in 2002), and academic critique.1 This is a reflection of his multi-disciplinary training-he has always combinedparticipant-observation with the anthropology sociology and philosophy of science, blending empirical case studies with contentiousreformulationsof method. But this mix is also a mark of his desire to shake up the fixed grids of disciplines formed in the university by a "modernsettlement"in which he no longer believes. Instead, Latour pursues new and surprisingassemblages of knowledge, in part because he insists that the world is not safely divided between society and science, politics and nature, subjects and objects, social constructions and reality, but rather is populated increasingly by strange hybrids-what he variously calls "risky attachments"or "tangled objects" (Politics 22)-that cut across these divides and demandnew ways of thinking. A witty and elegant stylist, Latourhas proposed that "the hybrid genre that I have designed for a hybrid task is what I call scientifiction" (Aramis ix). He ratherdelightfully has no awareness that this was Hugo Gernsback's original coinage, in 1929, for what became science fiction, but then he has little to say directly about the genre, which he passingly dismisses as "inadequate" for his method (Aramis viii). Nevertheless, this short introductionwill explore how Latour's work can open a number of productive fronts for sf scholarship, transvaluing generic knowledge in general, but also provingparticularly helpful in theorizing recent hybridgenre fictions.
BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION
Of ANTs and Men. In the early part of his career, Latour's central aim, in common with other historians and sociologists of science, was to use various strategiesto resituatescience and technology in their perceived relationsto the social world. Science, as formulated slowly in the West by the scientific revolutionsfrom the seventeenthto nineteenthcenturies, was rarely interested in its own history except as a record of error progressively excluded from the productionof truth.Social factorsonly ever appearin these traditionalscientific accounts to explain error. False religious belief, smuggled into a leaky and amateurishlaboratory,produce incorrect objects like telepathy or ESP; false ideologicalbiases createinstanceslike Lysenkoism.Once these social intrusions are excluded, falsehood is eliminated and the properpath to truthis regained. Good science is thereforebeyondany social influences. This divide of social and technical knowledge produces, for Latour, a damagingpolitical configuration. The social practiceof Westerndemocracyis always limited by an absoluteoutside-Nature-to which only the scientific expert has privileged access, and whose facts are beyond dispute. One can have as many different cultural accounts as one likes, but this multiculturalism is only ever flotsam on the sea of mononaturalism. The overlaid binariesof social/scientific, political/natural, subject/object,value/factwork, Latourclaims, "torenderordinary,politicallife impotentthroughthe threatof incontestableNature" (Politics 10). Latour developed three early strategies to contest this modern scientific constitution. The first derived from anthropology.His first book, Laboratory Life (a collaborationwith Steve Woolgar [1979]), was the productof two years of participant-observation in an American laboratory. Reversing the usual directionof the anthropologist from centerto margin, anddirectingthe scientific gaze at science itself, Latour absorbed himself in the "tribe" of laboratory scientiststo collect fieldworkon the "routinelyoccurringminutiae"of everyday laboratorybehavior (LabLife 27).2 The materialcollected contestedthe image of the laboratoryas a sterile, inhuman place, showingthatthe practiceof science "widely regardedby outsidersas well organised, logical, and coherent, in fact consists of a disorderedarrayof observationswith which scientists struggle to produce order" (Lab Life 36). Some of Latour's central claims emerged from this work. The laboratoryis a place saturatedwith the social and political, and the technical cannotbe artificiallydivorced from these concerns, at least in the process of doing science. The divide is institutedlater, for instance in the retrospective reconstructionof laboratorypractice in the scientific research paper. Those incontestable scientific facts or essences are not waiting to be uncovered, but are the end result of long and laborious procedures that are messy and confusing. Yet Latour's point is misunderstoodif he is seen as merely arguingfor the social construction of science. He develops a critique of semioticians who upholdan absolutedivide betweenworld andword, realityandlanguage. Latour argues that the laboratoryis a "configurationof machines" (Lab Life 65), a multiple, overlapping set of tracking devices that transcribe and translate materialsubstancesinto grids, graphs, logbooks, codings, diagrams,equations, andlanguage. The culturalrelativistmight say thatthe objectivereality referred
FICTION SCIENCE VOLUME 33 (2006) STUDIES,
to is an end product of these transcriptions,but Latour will later develop the point that in this complex arrayof inscriptionof the real into signification, "we never detect the rupture between things and signs and we never face the impositionof arbitraryand discrete signs on shapeless and continuousmatter" (Pandora's Hope 56). Latour wants to challenge the rejection of social and culturalfactors in science, but he is equally concernedto reject facile accounts thatreduce everythingin science to social constructionor mattersof representation and interpretation.For Latour, this merely reverses the polarity of the insidious object/subjectdivide, and his later work aims to think about a new dispensation that cuts across this, by talking about alliances of humans and nonhumans(see next section, below). Latourcontinuesto use the methodsof fieldwork, suggestingthatit can open des commenmultiplefrontsof critiquein additionto "latradition philosophique taires de texts" (Monde Pluriel 6; "the philosophical tradition of textual commentary").The second strategyof contestationcomes from the history of science. Scientific practice is often presentist, proceeding by the erasure of incorrect assumptions,rival hypotheses, and wrong turns. A general tactic to resocialize science has been to recover the social of history of truth (to use Steven Shapin'sphrase). This historicisttactic looks at exemplaryinstancesof the institutionaland ideological formation of scientific naturalism, scientific controversies(treating"winners"and "losers" symmetrically),or instancesof lost or abandoned theories. Latourborrowedmuch of the methodof the English historiansand sociologists of science sometimes called the EdinburghSchool, and published The Pasteurization of France in 1988.3 In this study, Louis Pasteur's genius is analytically decomposed: he is no longer the heroic discovererof the microbialtransmissionof disease againstunenlightenedrivals in the mid-nineteenthcentury, but is the master of strategicallycombininghis laboratory findings with a vast array of different elements and interests that stretchfar beyond his closed vacuum flasks. In order for his theory to win out, Pasteur binds together a set of interests that include farmers, army doctors, Louis Bonaparte,hygienists, newspapers, French nationalism,the bureaucrats of the Second Empire, cows, industrialists,popular and specialist journals, transport experts, andthe FrenchAcademy, as well as the microbesthemselves. This sort of sociological history of science has become very familiar (it has partly dislodged the heroic, internalistscientific biography, for instance). Yet the apparentlychaotic listing of Pasteur's interests, breaching all apparent categorizationor ordering, has become Latour's signaturedevice. Elsewhere, he lists some of the interests at play in the crisis aroundthe outbreakof "mad cow disease" in Europe, includingthe EuropeanUnion, the beef market,prions in the laboratory,politicians,vegetarians, publicconfidence, farmers,andNobel prize-winningFrench scientists. "Does this list sound heterogeneous?"Latour asks. "Too bad-it is indeed this power to establish a hierarchy among incommensurable positions for which the collective must now take responsibility" (Politics 113). This listing is the markof Latour'sthird strategyto contest the modern scientific settlement:the actor-network.
The Pasteurisation of France is the book-length concrete example that enacted the theory worked out in Latour's most importantearly book, Science in Action (1987). In this, Latourtraces how a scientist might succeed enough to make a proposition into a "black box," a statementfixed as an uncontested scientific fact, with any history of contest or controversy in its production completely erased. He starts with the small-the rhetoric of the scientific paper-and builds a model that incorporates more and more elements: the laboratory, colleagues, funders from industry, government, or the military, machines, technology transfers, other sciences, the educated public, the uneducatedpublic, the press, and so on. As before, the aim is to show that science is thoroughlysocialized andproducedthrough"heterogeneous chainsof association":"We are never confrontedwith science, technology, and society, but with a gamutof weaker and strongerassociations"(Science in Action 100101). Althoughthis deliberatelyintermixeselements, Latouris carefulto argue thata successful statementalso needs to form a disciplinarystructure,a policed realm of experts and expertise, an inside and an outside. He does not break down the conditions for rigorous scientific knowledge; however, inverting received wisdom, he claims that "theharder,the purerthe science is inside, the furtheroutside the scientists have to go" (Science in Action 156). There is no suchthingas "pure"science, becausethese are the laboratories thathave to seek the most funding, the most governmental and industrial support. Big technoscience only survives by connecting itself to the state and the military: "technoscienceis partof a war machineand shouldbe studiedas such" (Science in Action 172). Science is thereforesuccessful not to the degree that it isolates itself from society, but to the degree that it creates networks and multiplies connections, and to the extent that it can be assessed by "the numberof points linked, the strength and length of the linkage, the nature of the obstacles" (Science in Action 201). The starkestsymbol of Latour's rejection of asocial theories of science is how he presents the equation or formula: the purest, compressedstatementof incontestable andunchangingfactto some, the equation is for Latoura knot, somethingthat succeeds because it is so well connected, tightly binding together as it does the maximumheterogeneouselements into a single enunciation. The networkis figuredby Latourthroughmetaphors of knotsandloops. One of his most lucid expositions of what elements need to be addressed when considering any scientific concept (a term he often replaces with "knot")is a passage in Pandora's Hope (1999). Buildingon the assertionthat "[t]he truthof what scientists say no longer comes from their breaking away from society, conventions, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the circulatingreferences that cascade througha great numberof transformations and translations"(Pandora 97), Latourlists the five minimalloops thatneed to be traced: first, mobilizationof the world, which is the complex, variegatedset of processes for transporting objects from the real world into scientific discourse; second, autonomization,which is the way a discipline moves from amateurto professional, forming its own criteria and expertise for scientific knowledge along the way; third, alliances, which reverse autonomysince here
SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME 33 (2006) STUDIES,
diverse, extra-scientific interests are "enrolled"in the supportof a particular in chemistry, the militaryin atomic science (kings in cartography,industrialists physics, and so on); fourth,publicrepresentation, since "scientistswho had to travel the world to make it mobile, to convince colleagues to lay siege to ministersand boards of directors, now have to take care of their relationswith anotheroutside world of civilians: reporters,pundits, and the man and woman in the street" (Pandora105); finally, the knotof the scientific concept itself, harderto study yet part of this topology because it is "a very tight knot at the centre of a net" (Pandora 106). These ideas helped form Actor-NetworkTheory. This is not solely identified with Latour,and its origins are often ascribedto a joint paperLatourwrote with Michel Callon in 1981, entitled "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan." ANT has since been takenup by some English sociologists, such as John Law, who sees its value in the productivetensionbetween the centeredactorandthe decentered network, enabling the critic to move across different scales of explanation.4 Subsuming Latour into the familiar post-structuralism of Lyotard and Deleuze/Guattari,Law regardsANT as "a semiotic machinefor waging war on essential differences" (7). Latour has been rather more circumspect:he has registeredhis suspicionof the terms Actor (he prefers the term actant, since this might also include nonhumans), Network (which risks becoming a dead metaphor,a statictopology or grid ratherthansomethingdynamicallyforged by science in process), and Theory (which Latour claims to avoid as it would constrainhis ethnomethodology of following actors in each fresh situation).He even suspects the hyphen between Actor-Networkas fixing a binary between individual agency and systemic forces that he wished to displace (see "On RecallingANT"). Latourhas not been able to kill off the term-a lesson perhaps thata single actorcannotnecessarilycontrolthe network-and has more recently embraced it fully, publishing Reassembling the Social (2005), his first introductoryexposition of ANT. For Latourthe "maintenet" of ANT "is that the actors themselves make everything, including their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics" ("On Using ANT" 67). All of Latour's work in Science in Actionand beyond might seem an aggressive, counter-intuitive sociological theoryof science, intenton dethroning scientific legitimacy. In fact Latourclaims it is a form of almost naive realism: as his commentsaboutANT suggest, he claims he has imposednothing, but has merely followed scientific actorsthemselves, trackinghow they behave, andthe connectionsand networksthatthey create. Embeddedin all of Latour'swork is a strong critique of sociological and critical schools that seek "social explanations" of science. Latourdoes not wish to fashionexplanationsthatdecode what his actors do. He is opposed to the attempt to demystify or expose "real" conditionsas a Marxistmight, and distanceshimself from sociologies thathave the arrogantbelief that they can explain the actors any better than the actors themselves. For Latour, the social as a term of explanation needs to be rethought:it is not a sort of ether that invisibly permeateseverythingelse as a hidden context, but is the resultof the associations or links that bind together scientific, political, cultural, economic, and other practices. He appeals to a
BRUNO SCIENTIFICTION LATOUR'S
"sociology of associations"to replace all critical sociologies that use predetermined categories for determiningsocial groups. Each social object is a specific set of associationsthat produces its own terms of analysis. This approachhas the pragmatist's air of the distrust of any system, and indeed Latour has more than once appealedto the work of William James to support his own position. Yet pragmatism can often be a faux-naif stance, designed to disable critics. Latour's work has undoubtedly become more explicitly political, and he has taken aim at the political conservatisminherent in the ideological constructof Science wielded in the Science Warsof the 1990s. In Politics of Nature (2004), Latourwants to liberatethe practice of the (lower case, plural)sciences from the ideological stranglehold of (capitalized,singular) Science. This will accomplishnothingless thanthe revitalizationof democracy, and may even solve the clash of fundamentalisms between East and West, as explored in his reaction to the events of September 11, War of the Worlds (2002). This peace-making desire is perhaps a response to Donna Haraway's observation that Latour's method and view of scientific practice in Science in Action was insistently war-like: science works by strenuousbattles to "win" controversies and outflank rivals, to marshal armies, and so on. The heroic, masculinistnarrativeof science was being unwittinglyrepeatedby Latour:"The story told is told by the same story" (Modest_Witness 34). This is acute: after all, the French title of Latour'sbook on Pasteurmight have been more literally translatedas lTheMicrobes: War and Peace. Yet Latour's irenic turn in the 1990s is attributable not just to Haraway's critique, but also to the influence of the French philosopherand historianof science Michel Serres, who in a booklength interview with Latourspoke of working "in a spirit of pacifism" against the contest of the faculties (Serres 32). Finally, though, his turnto the political was drivenby the challenge Latourmountedin WeHave Never Been Modem to the war set up between subjectsandobjectsby the modernsettlement.Let's now turn to this importantpolemical intervention. The Modern Settlement and Latour's Nonmodernism. Fromhis early books, we already have a sense that Latour regards the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century as a very particularorganization of the world. This is formulatedas the modern constitutionor settlement in We Have Never Been Modem, a separation of Nature and Culture into two distinct ontologies; according to Latour, modernity works obsessively at "purification," the categorizing of the world according to a binary that sorts humans from nonhumans,subjectsfromobjects. A politics emerges fromthis dispensation that is inflexible andoften violent: natureis to be dominated;othercultures, refusing to accept the disciplining of the progressive, linear time of modernity, are regardedas objects, sunkin nature.Savages andsuperstitions mix the social and the natural indiscriminately; science progressively separates these spheres. "Modernisation consists in continuallyexiting from an obscure age thatmingled the needs of society with scientific truthin orderto enter into a new age thatwill finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes from humans"(We Have Never 71).
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SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
For Latour, this modem constitutionhas always operatedimperfectly: it is involved in a "doublecreationof a social context and a naturethat escapes that very context" (16), and yet regardsNature (the guarantorof scientific truth)as pre-givenandextra-discursive. If NatureandCultureare co-produced,however, they are in constantcontact and dialogue, conductingendless translationsand mediations. The fury of purificationis driven by a secret history of miscegenation, of the intermixing of categories. We have never been modem. Latour argues that this realization has been thruston us by recent developmentsthat confrontus with a rapid proliferationof hybrid objects that confound modem categories. Are ozone holes, global warming, AIDS, epidemics of obesity and allergy, hospitalsuperbugs,Asian bird flu, and mad cow disease the productof natural or cultural, human or nonhuman, processes? They cannot be "sorted"-categorized or resolved-in any straightforward way. Indeed, in the case of global warming, the passageto black-boxedfact is continuallyfrustrated and scientific argument inextricably intermingled with political, industrial, ecological, and myriadother interests. We have moved from "mattersof fact" to "mattersof concem," situatingthe practiceof science in wider networksand longer chains of association. This transitionhas been discussedby some critics as the passage from an era of Science to one of Research, a move from autonomyto the imbricationof science, culture, and economy: "all these domainshad become so 'intemally' heterogeneousand 'externally'interdependent, even transgressive,thattheyhad ceased to be distinctiveand distinguishable"(Nowotny et al. 1). Latoursees it as the recognitionof the very hybriditythat was always inducedby the modem settlement. Hybrid objects "have no clear boundaries, no sharp separation between their own hard kemel and their environment,"he expands in Politics of Nature: "Theyfirst appearas mattersof concern, as new entitiesthatprovoke perplexity and thus speech in those who gather aroundthem, and argue over them" (Politics 24, 66). He suggests we need a re-formulationof the binaries thatrecognizes this increasinglypopulousexcludedmiddle, a space in which we " (WeHave need to graspthe "nonseparability of quasi-objects andquasi-subjects Never 139). This would in turnproduce a new constitutionand thereforea new politics: "It is time, perhaps, to speak of democracyagain, but of a democracy extendedto things themselves" (We Have Never 141). Latour's polemic appeared at the time when many critical accounts of modemity were being producedunderthe umbrellaof postmodernism.Some of his formulationsmight look postmodern-perhaps most obviously the idea that abandoningthe linear time of modernity will open up multiple, co-existent times.5 Yet Latouris scathing about the postmodernturn. Whetherit is JeanFrancois Lyotard's collapse of metanarratives into the "petits recits" of incommensurable language games or JiirgenHabermas'sargumentagainstthe postmodernsfor a return to separatespheres of knowledge, Latourconsiders these as desperaterearguard actions to maintainthe purificationthatdominated the modern settlement. The modish Jean Baudrillardexemplifies for Latoura pointlesspickingover the ruinsof the modern,incapableof conceiving any other dispensationand sunk in nihilism. In this decadentphase, Latourworries that
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critiquehas collapsed into extreme relativismor conspiracytheory ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" 228). He sees this as sharing much with a regressive anti-modernview that is preparedto annihilateall the virtues of the Enlightenment along with its vices. Instead, Latour declares himself a nonmodernist: "We can keep the Enlightenment withoutmodernity"(WeHave Never 135). This stancecrucially involves makingthe subject/objectdivide far more porous, and rethinkingand extendingmodem humanism,which has sortedaccording"to a small numberof powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothingbut simple mute forces" (We Have Never 138). The constitutionneeds to be reconfiguredso thathumansand nonhumansare networkedtogether in a new kind of collective. This collective has been envisionedby Latourin Politics of Nature, where "democracy can only be conceived if it can freely traversethe borderbetween science andpolitics, in order to add a series of new voices to the discussion ... the voices of nonhumans"(69). That compulsive need of the modernsto purify is not simply dissolved (it is still helpful to have these categories), but the nonmodernist values acts of linkage, association, and heterogeneousassemblage: Weshallalways go fromthemixedto thestillmoremixed,fromthecomplicated to thestillmorecomplicated.... We no longerexpectfromthefuture thatit will emancipate us fromall ourattachments; on thecontrary, we expectthatit will attachus withtighter bondsto the morenumerous crowdsof alienswho have becomefully-fledged of thecollective.(Politics191) members This is the maturevision of Latour's later work. Criticism of Latour's work is often tied to methodologicalquestionsin the sociology of science. The key objectionis termedby Simon Schaffer "theheresy of hylozoism, an attribution of purpose, will and life to inanimatematter, and of humanintereststo the nonhuman" (182). David Bloor has similarlyobjected, in muchharsherterms, to Latour'stransgression of the foundational philosophical axioms of modernsociology (see also Elam). Latour'sdefense ranges from the disarmingly honest (he suggests to one group of interviewers that his philosophical apparatusis really "not very deep" [Crease 19]), to the more serious view that Bloor's sociology quintessentiallybelongs to the modern settlementitself, relying as it does on the strictKantian divorce of subjectiveand objective worlds that Latour is specifically trying to unravel ("For David Bloor"). It is of course a provocationto talk aboutthe "interests"or "voices"' of nonhumans,and it is in total conflict with the hermeneuticsthatstill dominate critique. Yet perhapsreadersof SFS are less traumatized by this move thanthe philosophers of STS. Not only are we more familiar with interdisciplinary formulations of post-humanism (for instance, in Donna Haraway's recent attemptsto articulatea "companionspecies" kinship as part of a wider critique of modernity:see her "Cyborgsto CompanionSpecies"), but also because the fantasmaticwork of sf has been consistently bound up with imagining the interestsof the nonhuman,andhas been fascinatedwith the productionof those hybrid forms the modernsettlementwould deem monstrous.
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Implications for SF. I hope thatthis brief survey of Latour'swork has already begun to sparkpotentialways of reading sf, even as his work veers across both the forms of critique and the modern/postmodern paradigmthat has tended to dominatesf criticism in recent times. Here, I just want to sketch out the ways in which I think Latourcan enable new directions in sf scholarship. First, it is obvious that there cannot be a Latourian theory that can be abstractedand subsequently applied to sf, like all those theoretical canning factories that process the raw material of sf and turn it into the product of a particularschool. Instead, sf can be thoughtof as a link that can be tied into many different kinds of chains of association or networks of influence, sometimes in surprising or unpredictableways. This is how it appears in Latour's own Aramis, his "scientifictional"study of a revolutionarytransport project for Paris that failed in the 1980s. As Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint explore later in this issue, Aramis is presented in a cacophony of voices: political, industrial, financial, and technological interest groups are cited directly, interspersedwith a dialogue between a cynical professor and a naive STS student;this cacophony is in turn cut across by fragmentsof a theory of technology, along with lengthy citations from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley's proto-sf text helps Latour imagine the way in which large technoscientificprojectsare stitchedtogetherwith improvisedelements, which can then escape designed intentionsanddevelop their own "nonhuman" actions. This mythic structurewas also in the minds of manydifferentparticipants in the Aramis case: it was formative, rather than secondary or reflective. Sf might appearlike this in other stories: for example, in the oft-told way that the genre contributed formatively to the military-scientific-industrial productionof the nuclear bomb. H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914) was one of the importantlinks in Leo Szilard's ardentpolitical campaigningfor an American atomic program; Wells was then hooked into a very different (and in the end weaker) networkof resourcesfor the atomic scientistslobbyingto stop first-use of the bomb, and then for world governmentafter first-use. We might also think in Latourian ways about the weird networks of connections that produce science-fictional religions-one of the more striking phenomena associated with the genre since 1945. Hubbard's Dianetics took resources from experimental psychology, the discourse of the American engineer, space-operaplots, and John W. Campbell's messianic belief in the socially transformativepotential of sf. The Raelian group similarly binds together genetics and cloning with an eschatology borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke. These networks of association might be weak, thinly populated, and definitively marginal, but Latour allows us to read how these bizarrely heterogeneous formations operate. The complex socio-politico-scientific embeddednessof sf could be considerably clarified by Latour's approachto networks and assemblages, chains of weaker and stronger associationthat cut across science, technology, and society. Second, and consequently, the dynamic topology of the network does somethingto displace the static topographiesof center and marginor high and low. It is not necessarily useful to dissolve these categories entirely (there is a
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certain rigidity to the economics of genre publishing, after all), but they might be regardedas less finally determiningfor sf. Instead, the genre might be seen to intermixmore dynamically, making weaker or strongerassociations across the matrix of culturalpower. Sometimes sf becomes a privileged lens through which a lot of social processes can be translatedfor the wider culture-as in cyberpunkin the 1980s (justat the time when sf writers such as LarryNiven and JerryPournellesuccessfully connectedintothe circuitsof the New RightReagan At othertimes sf remainsmarginal,decoupledfrommainstream administration). cultural formations and with few kudos. This marginality can of course sometimes generate genuine subculturalenergy (as in the American political satires of the 1950s or the writings of the British Boom in the 1990s, for instance). This approachwould also be interested in the hybridizationsof different genres that Gary Wolfe has called "the postgenre fantastic" or "genre implosion"-the mixes of Gothic, thriller, detective fiction, fantasy, and sf that have proliferatedin recent years. Sf criticismhas been somewhatobsessed with purification,with the kind of sorting and rigid categorizationLatourargues is typical of the modem settlement. Criticism, instead, might be much more interested in cross-fertilizations between genre and mainstreamwriting and mightjudge generic transgressionsless punitively. If we read the history of sf as nonmodernists, it might then appear that the genre has never been modern-that it was never a pure form and has produced little except "hybrid" writings (a position I tried to argue in my book Science Fiction). This may involve dispensingwith some of the subcultural ressentiment thatstill attendsthe genre. Purism is isolationism, which means fewer connections and therefore weaker culturalinfluence. Third, Latour's sense that we live a world of proliferatinghybrids might actually help us read recent sf. Several instances spring to mind. China Mieville's New Weird is a fusion of English Gothic, dark fantasy, and sf traditions,andhis fictions are frequentlyorganizedaroundspectacular set-pieces of hybrid creaturesthat cut across received categorizations.The ichthyscaphoi in Iron Council (2004) is "a mongrel of whale-sharkdistendedby bio-thaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized,varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protruberant like prolapsedveins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely" (454). This clatterof adjectival over-determinationis Mieville's principal strategy, and reads very much like one of Latour's lists of heterogeneouselements, combininghuman, animal, and machine. A similarfascinationwith hybridbeings and transformed modes of categorizationinforms JustinaRobson's NaturalHistory (2003). Yet reading sf by means of Latour does not privilege those hybrid forms usually associatedwith softer sf. Indeed, Latour's insistentfocus on the social andpoliticalconnectionsof science andtechnologyalso meanshe is illuminating in readingmuch hardersf traditions.An exemplarytext in this regardmight be Paul McAuley's WhiteDevils (2004), which is typical of certaintrendsin many ways. The generic location of McAuley's novel is extremely difficult to determine: it continues the author's move from space opera to crossover
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technothriller.It is a breathlessand kinetic low entertainment, but one studded with contemplative passages that resonate with Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and it contains the exorbitantviolence of the JohnWebsterrevenge tragedyfrom which it takes its name. McAuley also slices throughthe distinctionbetween "hard"and "soft" sf. WhiteDevils is undoubtedly hardsf: it is the kind of book thatwants to teach the reader the distinction between mitochondrialand genomic DNA, and its imaginarysciences are extrapolated from currentbiotech research. Yet it is also fascinatedwith subjectivityand traumaticbreaches of humanidentity, the kind of material long identified with soft sf. The hybridizationof these traditions refuses to continue a long factional war-but refuses, in Latourianterms, precisely becauseof the productionof new hybridsthatrequirea reconfiguration of the subject/objector human/nonhuman divide. WhiteDevils explicitly thematizeshow Science has given way to an era of Research, presenting a messy and confused world where the laboratory is inextricably mixed with politics, aid agencies, and "open-source late-stage capitalism" (141). The pure scientist is described as a "relict species.... You exist in a marginalenvironment.Always you must strugglefor funds, scrapsof endowments,sponsorship,andalways you mustwork harderfor less andless.... The nineteenth-centuryculture of science's Golden Age ... was destroyed" (314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for heavily capitalized illicit research, released from any regulationor ethics. It has resultedin the proliferation of hybridobjects and new actantsthat cannoteasily be sorted accordingto the modem settlement. The pandemic of the "plastic disease," for example, results from gene manipulation,so that insects transportmaterial originally designed to make hydrocarbonsin plants: "in the last stages of the disease, the victims are turnedinto grotesqueliving statues,paralysedby hard,knottystrings and lumps of polymer under their skin and muscles" (24). The inability to distinguishhuman and nonhumanis what drives the thriller plot, these terms regularly and feverishly inverting. Are the white devils human or genetic reconstructions of pre-human hominids? What happens when researchers actively seek to dethronehumanpriority,cloning extinctrivals?Oneprotagonist trackingdown the white devil "atrocities"is discovered to be less human than thought, and the terrain of the Democratic Republic of Congo is full of monstrosities. Yet the monsters at the core of the tale prove more humanthan some of their pursuers. In this, there is anotherrevision of the sensibility that sustainedConrad or Wells: in a world of hybrids, there can be no monsters. AlthoughIstvanCsicsery-Ronayhas arguedfor a postmodemgrotesque,where "anomalous deviations ... are norms" (72), it may be that the horror of transgressionthathas powered the Gothic and the Grotesquewould have to be wholly reconceived once the modem obsession with sorting, categorizing, and purifyinghas been displaced. Anotherset of texts thatvirtuallyenact Latour'sinsistenceon networksand tangled objects is Kim Stanley Robinson'songoing series aboutthe science and politics of global warming, which so far includesFortySigns of Rain (2004) and Fifty Degrees Below (2005). Latour has used global warming as an instance
15
of concern"supersede"matters of fact. " Robinson'sbooks stage where "matters the disputes over evidence of climate change and the attempts of scientific researchers, political advisors, laboratory workers, funding bureaucrats, senators,mathematic modelers,displacedTibetans,traumatized sociobiologists, andothersto persuadea Republicangovernmentto acknowledgethe crisis in the midst of extreme weather events. What heterogeneousalliance can be forged against the hegemonic bloc of rapacious capital? The strategy of forming alliances and networks that cut across diverse and heterogeneous sites is explicitly worked out in the novels; the pleasingly odd centralcharacterbegins as a reductive sociobiologist, but develops an understanding of the politics of science that values the need for "impure"connections, making diverse and surprisinglinks. Withwork like this from so-called "hard"sf (one mightfurther include Gregory Benford or Greg Bear as writers modeling the associative networks of science), the modern dispensationthat sustained the distinction between hardand soft within the genre may be largely superseded,as the social and the scientific find themselves continually imbricated.Thinkingabouttheir work throughLatourwould demandthis supersessionas a redundant dispensation of the modernconstitution. It may be, then, that Latour'swork is useful not only as yet anothercritical resource to overlay onto fiction but also as a useful guide to articulatingthe hybridityof recent sf. It links sf into a network of associationsthat registers a transformationof scientific authorityin the contemporaryworld, helping to explain why sf has become such a vital node in the collective for thinking throughour contemporarymattersof anxious concern.
NOTES 1. For law, see La Fabrique;for religion, see Jubiler; for art, see Latourand Peter, Iconoclash; for recent commentaryon critique, see "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" 2. Latourtrainedfirst as an anthropologist,doing fieldwork in the Ivory Coast. He has spoken about the influence of Marc Auge on the attemptto create a "symmetrical anthropology"-that is, one that does not presume superiorityof West over East or observer over observed, and that can employ anthropologicalmethod reversibly (see Latour, Un Monde Pluriel). 3. Work from the EdinburghSchool (now long dispersed) includes that of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Latour has translated a number of works of English sociology and history of science into French, but has ongoing methodologicaldisputes with a number of English counterparts,most recently with David Bloor: see Bloor's "Anti-Latour"and Latour's reply, "For David Bloor." A helpful starting point is Schaffer's lengthy review of Latour's Pasteurisationof France. 4. JohnLaw also runsthe Actor NetworkResourcewebsite; see < http://www.lancs. >. ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm 5. In fact, this borrows heavily from Michel Serres's arguments for a multitemporalitythat confoundsconventionalhistoriography:"An object, a circumstance,is polychronic, multitemporal,and reveals a time that is gatheredtogether, with multiple pleats" (Serres and Latour 60). For Serres, this is part of a simultaneity of widely distributedhistoricalresourcesthatentirely refuse any of the kinds of ruptural narrative
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usually associated with postmodernism.For more conceptuallinks between Serres and Latour, see LauraSalisbury's essay in this issue. WORKS CITED Bloor, David. "Anti-Latour."Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30.1 (1999): 81-112. Callon, Michel andBrunoLatour. "Unscrewingthe Big Leviathan:How Actors MacroStructureReality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So." Advances in Social 7Theory and Methodology:Towardan Integrationof Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. Ed. Karin Knorr-Cetinaand Aron Cicourel. London: Routledge, 1981. 277-303. Crease, Robertet al. "Interviewwith BrunoLatour." ChasingTechnoscience: Matrixfor Materiality. Ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger. Bloomington:IndianaUP, 2003. 1526. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. "On the Grotesquein Science Fiction." SFS 29.1 (March 2002): 71-99. Elam, Mark. "Living Dangerously with Bruno Latour in a Hybrid World." Theory, Cultureand Society 16.4 (1999): 1-24. Haraway, Donna J. "Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience." Chasing Technoscience:Matrixfor Materiality. Ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger. Bloomington, IndianaUP, 2003. 58-82. ? Meets_OncomouseTM: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan Feminismand Technoscience. London: Routledge, 1997. Latour, Bruno. Aramis or the Love of Technology. 1993. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge,MA: HarvardUP, 1996. . La Fabriquedu droit: une ethnographiedu conseil d'etat. Paris: La D6couverte, 2002. . "For David Bloor ... And Beyond: A Reply." Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30.1 (1999). 113-29. Jubiler ou les Tourments de la parole religieuse. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Un Monde Pluriel Mais Commun:Entretiensavec Francois Ewald. Paris: Ed. L'Aube, 2005. . "OnRecallingANT. " Actor-Network TheoryandAfter. Ed. JohnLaw andJohn Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 15-25. . "On Using ANT for Studying InformationSystems: A (Somewhat) Socratic Dialogue." The Social Study of Informationand CommunicationTechnology. Ed. Christanthi Avgerou, ClaudioCiborra,and FrankLand. Oxford: OxfordUP, 2004. 62-76. . Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUP, 1999. . The Pasteurization of France. 1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUP, 1988. . Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. 1999. Trans. CatherinePorter. Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUP, 2004. . Reassembling the Social: An Introductionto Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. . Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers ThroughSociety. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUP, 1987. . Warofthe Worlds:WhataboutPeace? Trans. CharlotteBigg. Chicago:Prickly Paradigm, 2002.
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. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991. Trans. CatherinePorter. Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1993. . "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry30 (Winter2004): 225-48. and Peter Weibel. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Warsin Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. and Steve Woolgar. LaboratoryLife: The Construction of ScientificFacts. 1979. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUP, 1986. Law, John. "After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology." Actor NetworkTheory and After. Ed. John Law and John Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 1-24. Luckhurst,Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge:Polity, 2005. McAuley, Paul. WhiteDevils. London: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Mieville, China. Iron Council. London: Macmillan, 2004. Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. Re-ThinkingScience: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty.Oxford: Polity, 2001. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. London: HarperCollins,2004. . Fifty Degrees Below. London: HarperCollins,2005. Robson, Justina. Natural History. London: Macmillan, 2003. Schaffer, Simon. "The EighteenthBrumaireof Bruno Latour." Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 22.1 (1991). 174-92. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversationson Science, Culture,and Time. 1994. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1995. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth:Civilityand Science in SeventeenthCentury England. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1994. Wolfe, Gary K. "Genre Implosion: Strategies of Dissolution in the Postmodern Fantastic." Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Social Transformation.Ed. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon. Pennsylvania: U of PennsylvaniaP, 2002. 11-29. ABSTRACT This essay introducesthe work of controversialhistorianandphilosopherof science and technology, BrunoLatour. It suggests thathis theories of hybridobjects, his analyses of networks that criss-cross normallydiscrete categories of science, politics, and culture, and his displacement of the modern/postmodernparadigm can offer productive new readingsof science fiction, permittingcritics to rethinkthe genre's relationto science and society. Latour's own "scientifictions"(his coinage) are examined alongside works by sf authorsChina Mieville, Paul McAuley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

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SCIENCE FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)