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To De-Epistemologize . . .

I begin at a micro level: two innocent-looking footnotes that transport us from the study of science as it is carried out in laboratories to the awareness of Gaia. The first is from Latour's La Science en action, a book that you might recall was first published in English in 1987 before being translated into French1: "One can read with interest Ginzburg's (1980) counterexample which, he thinks, can separate the sciences of the trace or symptom from 'exact' sciences."2 The second is from Stengers, in The Invention of Modern Science, first published in 1993:3 "On this subject, see how Carlo Ginzburg contrasts the sciences of proof and the sciences of indices."4 The same reference, but on the one hand a doubt ("He thinks it can") and on the other an affirmation ("On this subject, see . . ."). Is Ginzburg's suggestion concerning the different ways of doing science merely superficial, or will it be included, in various ways, in subsequent debates between our two authors? What will they make of it in the course of their respective works?

Ginzburg is an historian, and also a philosopher. The example he is working on here is about the dating of a picture in art history. In order to distinguish a real painting from a fake, the expert has to focus on "the examination of the smallest details where the influence of the school to which the painter belongs is the least marked - which is the case for the earlobes, the fingernails, the shape of the fingers and toes." "The art connoisseur and the detective may well be compared, each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting."5 He concludes:

This "low intuition" is rooted in the senses (though it goes beyond them) - and as such it has nothing to do with the extrasensory intuition of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century irrationalisms. It exists everywhere in the world, without geographic, historical, ethnic, gender, or class exception; and this means that it is very different from any form of "superior" knowledge, which is always restricted to an elite. It was the heritage of the Bengalis whom Sir William Herschel expropriated; of hunters; of mariners; of women. It forms a real link between the human animal and other animal species.6

Ginzburg is thus suggesting a way to exit from what he calls the dead end between rationality and irrationality by putting the accent on a practice that does not relate to the modern experimental sciences, but nonetheless deserves to be identified and celebrated. Now we understand a little better why Latour and Stengers read him carefully.

It would obviously be absurd to want to summarize or pin down, to just these two footnotes, the incredible intellectual exchange that has gone on for several decades between these two authors, these two friends. Yet they can serve as a marker for the way in which Latour's work has been discussed by Stengers, and opened up a space for a constant coming and going which has nourished a large number of authors working on science and technology, and especially today those engaged in struggles around the "New Climatic Regime" - which Stengers calls our "catastrophic times."

If this common reference - hesitant in one case, firm in the other - appearing very early in their respective works, is so interesting, it is because it alerts us to sciences that are not defined as "experimental," that are not based in laboratories in the strict sense (except when one broadens the definition of laboratory, which Latour will do sometimes). It turns out that they will also be, for the most part, the very sciences - like geology, ethology, or climatology - without which we would be at a disadvantage when it comes to facing Gaia. But let us not jump ahead to our conclusion!

How, then, can the sciences be put in their place? How can we prevent "Science" (with a capital S) cannibalizing all knowledges, all practices? If both Latour and Stengers are ambitious about answering these questions, they will nonetheless go about it in very different ways, although through a common operator: they are going to embark on disarticulating Science without going by way of simple "critique." Neither of them is looking for what drives their actors - scientists in this case - without their knowledge. They do not want to demask; rather they want to characterize, by striving better to "get a fix" on the actors and onto their work, to speak better about what they are doing and thus to render the old epistemology, in particular the Bachelardian one, obsolete. That epistemology could be called "critical" in that it thought it was revealing the background to the scientists' work, in which the idea of Reason was central. And for both Latour and Stengers, it was indeed a matter of going back to scientific practices. For Latour, "'practice' is not something that you observe de visu, but it is more a method of observation. It is a genre that may retrieve as much from dead documents and immensely distant times as from visitable sites."7 And, for Stengers, "the practices of a scientist, a technician, or a lawyer imply a particular art of attention; these practices permit them, even demand of them, when they are not automatic, to hesitate and to learn."8 Latour echoes this when he writes that it is a question of proposing "concepts that try to capture the actual experience of multiple actors, in terms that put them less in contradiction with themselves."9

Now I shall dwell at some length on Latour's work, before coming back to that of Stengers.

Could there be anything else that makes us prouder of who we are, we who Latour calls the "Moderns" (Latour has inherited from Charles Péguy the idea that the "modern world" was a "universal disaster," a "monstrous disruption" born of the aborted social revolution10), than our special relationship with the sciences? Probably nothing, which is why we had to begin with them to carry out our auto-ethnography, just as we have done the anthropology of others. Everything began in 1979 with the publication in English of Laboratory Life, written with Steve Woolgar. But this work on the anthropology of the sciences will be taken up again in multiple ways, eventually stretching over more than forty years.11 So it is quite reasonable to think that the science studies initiated in the laboratories of Professor Guillemin - who will receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine - at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, was, from the very start, but a detour in a larger project: understanding ourselves, we who attribute so much importance to the sciences we are inventing and mastering. This ambition is also in evidence in the other inquiries carried out by Latour, on religious speech, or the fabrication of the law,12 but it is clearly expressed in Irreductions from 1984.13 This essay is quite amazing in that it precedes most of Latour's ethnographic studies, and can be closely aligned with his later philosophical ideas, in particular those that will appear in Facing Gaia and the two following books, Down to Earth and After Lockdown. He himself refers to it as his "Tractatus Scientifico-Politicus," alluding to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

From the start, Latour chose not to take "capitalism" as his point of departure because he thought it too narrow ("Capitalism is still marginal even today. Soon people will realize that it is universal only in the imagination of its enemies and advocates"14); he would look to the larger picture of the "modern world." In order to do this, he borrowed from Michel Tournier's Friday, Or the Other Island, a rewrite of the Robinson Crusoe story. When Friday, in this novel, accidently blows up the gunpowder carefully recovered by Robinson, the latter finds he is "naked as he was on his first day." So he begins to follow Friday who, he discovers "lives on an entirely different island . . . while Friday finds himself among rivals, allies, traitors, friends, confidants, a whole mass of brothers and chums, of whom only one carries the name of man."15

Robinson lived in a well-ordered world, a world he thought was simple and in which he was alone. What he discovers is a mixed up, implex, world, more inhabited, complicated, and rich. "How many actants are there? This cannot be determined until they have been measured against each other."16 What is the force of an actant (this term can be used for nonhumans, keeping the term "actor" for humans)? It is its capacity to associate with other actants. So they have to be followed patiently in all their twists and turns, without grouping them into the two categories dictated by the Great Divide, subject and object, or society and nature.

The Moderns' power consists in associating - under the cloak, so to speak - forces that appear irreducible the ones to the others: science, religion, technique, geography, economy, the army...