Politics of Nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy by Bruno Latour, Harvard University Press, 拢16.95/$24.95, ISBN 0674013476
SOME time ago Bruno Latour visited 快猫短视频. 鈥淎h, so this is where objectivity is manufactured,鈥� he boomed. 鈥淚 should like to watch you make it鈥︹�� 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鈥檒l never work in theory 鈥� 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 鈥淪鈥� declares 鈥渢he world is thus鈥�, Latour argues in Politics of Nature, it short-circuits politics and democracy. This 鈥淪cience鈥� 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 鈥渁nticipate that it would end up administering the sky, the climate, the sea, viruses or wild animals鈥�. For example: 鈥淵ou want to save the elephants in Kenya鈥檚 parks by having them graze separately from cows? Excellent, but how are you going to get an opinion,鈥� Latour asks, 鈥渇rom the cows deprived of the elephants who clear the brush for them?鈥�
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 鈥� abolishing the distinction between epistemology and ontology, in the philosopher鈥檚 jargon. It aims to be the 鈥渟uccessor language to science and politics鈥� that Latour promised in Pandora鈥檚 Hope (快猫短视频, 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 鈥渇acts鈥� and 鈥渧alues鈥�. Latour traces the origin of this separation back to the 5th century BC, to Plato鈥檚 allegory of the cave whose inhabitants see mere shadows of a real world outside. It is worth reading 鈥� twice.