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How Critical Theory runo Latour, the French philosopher, died this month at
75. Known earlier in his career as a bold debunker of

Learned to Trust science's claim to objectivity, he in later years

reversed course and offered an account of why we

the Science should “believe science” after all—especially when

it came to climate change.

Jacob Shell One of the most revealing artifacts of Latour’s intellectual

shift is a 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run out of
Steam?,” which is in effect a self-disavowal. The article
presaged the crisis that now afflicts academic critical
theory, which is still seen by both detractors and adherents
as a subversive, iconoclastic discipline, but whose
practitioners have largely settled into the role of rubber-
stamping the latest ideological fads of cultural liberalism.
Critical theorists’ relinquishment of their critical stance has
kept them comfortably ensconced in academia at the
expense of the intellectual autonomy they once enjoyed.

Latour became famous for using sociological analysis to

October 14, 2022 deconstruct the operations of science. Books like Science in
PHOTO: KOKUYO VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Action (1987) and Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (1993)
exemplify his approach, which critiques the notion of a
neutral scientific truth by delving into the social contexts
in which scientific knowledge production takes place.

His work often focused on the laboratory, as suggested by

the title of his first book, co-written with Steve Woolgar,
Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts (1979).
However, Latour was also interested in the institutions
which fund and house laboratories—not only universities
but also foundations, government agencies, and
corporations. Extending this line of inquiry, he explored
the social and power relations between scientists and
funding gatekeepers and the influence of new technology
over how science is incentivized, conceptualized, and
socially realized in the lab.

For Latour, scientific facts are not discovered by scientists.

Rather, they are produced by “actor-networks,” which
encompass scientists, the institutional and social structures
that enable their work, and the objects they study and work
with (one of Latour’s innovations was to accord non-
human entities like subatomic particles and microbes
agency within the scientific process). The analysis of an
actor-network gives a critical theorist quite a lot to do,
because for every discovery reported by the natural
sciences, there is a vast actor-network to map out.

Latour’s approach subtly transfers the aura of authority

from the scientist to the critical theorist. The scientist,
once located within an actor-network, can be shown not to
have “discovered” anything, but rather to have played one
social role among many in a kind of conspiracy, hidden
even to its participants, among interacting social, technical,
and natural entities. By contrast, the critical theorist is
better positioned to play the authoritative role.

During the 1980s and 1990s, this intellectual framing had

obvious appeal to critical theorists in the social sciences
and humanities, who also needed to persuade institutions
and funding bodies of the value of their work. It was widely
imitated in new disciplines blending sociology with history
of science and technology.

In his 2004 article, however, Latour disavowed that

framing. Whereas previously, he had presented his actor-
network analytic as an epistemological master key to
understanding the socially transient nature of scientific
truth, he now presented critical theory as an obsolete
tactic: “Generals have always been accused of being on the
ready one war late, especially French generals—especially
these days.” What was the “war” in this gently self-
deprecating analogy? The answer is clear enough
throughout his subsequent work: the fight against global
warming.

If earlier, Latour had been a leading theorist

deconstructing the pretensions of science to neutrality and
objectivity, now the idea of a “Latourian” science-denialism
appalled him. As he noted, it would not be hard for a
different sort of theorist—a conspiracy theorist—to find
encouragement and even methodological guidance in his
work, given that he has “spent some time in the past trying
to show ‘the lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the
construction of facts.” Now, those who expressed
skepticism about climate science were making strikingly
similar arguments.

I
n recent years, the need to “trust the science” has nearly
become an article of faith among college-educated
elites, regardless of how much critical theory they
studied in college. So why had Latour, before his
disavowal, distrusted science? Why, more broadly, did
ideas like his gain traction in the academy in the final
decades of the last century?

The answer, in part, is that they appealed to a lingering

aversion among many post-1960s intellectuals to various
institutional and technological projects associated with
Cold War-era “Big Science.” The counterculture in which
these intellectuals had been steeped was hostile to Fordist
mass production, technocratic administration, the
development of nuclear weaponry, and the figure of the
“obedient engineer.” Latour offered them a way to transfer
intellectual authority away from scientists and engineers
and the institutions that employed them—and toward
themselves.

But climate science, for Latour and like-minded critical

theorists, wasn’t to be grouped in with Cold War-era Big
Science—even if climate science was, and is, both “Big” and
“Science.” It’s not hard to see why. Postwar Big Science had
been linked with the military-industrial complex and the
West’s pursuit of geopolitical dominance. In contrast,

“What work is left for climate scientists aligned themselves with activist causes

the critical theorist that originated in the counterculture, and saw themselves
as fighting on behalf of humanity as a whole and against the
resigned to ‘trusting fossil fuel industry and other industrial juggernauts.
the science’?” Hence, to join with the forces critiquing climate science
would be a tactical error that mistook the struggles of the
early 21st century for those of the previous century.

Even if we accept that premise, a dilemma remains: What

work is left for the critical theorist resigned to “trusting the
science”? After all, this attitude places such a figure well
downstream from the social arena Latour spent the prime
of his career critiquing: that of science and its social,
technological, and monetary support systems. So in this
new scenario, the theorist waits passively to receive truths
worked out in advance somewhere upstream. At best, after
receiving these truths, produced by scientists competing
over NSF funds and summit invitations, the critical
theorist adds some intellectual polish—or develops a
hermeneutic to stigmatize skeptics.

One objective of late 20th century critical theory had been

to maintain the intellectual sovereignty of the social
theorist and of the institutional and livelihood trappings
around this figure. A theorist who doesn’t merely “trust
the science” has his or her own type of work to do, and thus
has solid ground on which to assert intellectual autonomy.

In 2004, despite his pivot, Latour still valued this

autonomy. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” he
attempted to deal with this dilemma through an appeal to
the anti-modernist philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger offered Latour a distinction between authentic
and alienating experience, which Latour hoped to
repurpose as a mechanism to help a new generation of
critical theorists distinguish “good” from “bad” science.
The distinction is vague and almost tautological. Still,
Latour recognized that if critical theorists were to retain
any intellectual autonomy, they would have to refer to
some kind of value system more fundamental than science.

In the 2020s, the intellectual offspring of critical theory

have joined not only the fight against global warming, but
the fight against “misinformation.” This alignment
amounts to being even more credulous about claims of
stable, non-political distinctions between truth and
falsehood, since such distinctions are necessary to
determine what counts as “misinformation.” At the same
time, though, those informed by critical theory still engage
in selective science skepticism (notably, about the areas of
biology dealing with sex differences).

For critical theory, this represents a double failure. Latour’s

desire for a rigorous analytical mechanism for choosing
which science to embrace and which to treat as politically
constructed has not been fulfilled. Instead, a coalitional
logic worked out well upstream from the terrain of critical
theorists now determines which science they must identify
as good or bad. Critical theorists do not even cherry-pick
which science they deem trustworthy. They simply wait to
be told—by the foundations that fund their work, or by
political parties and activists—which cherries to pick and
which to avoid.

Today, critical theorists would likely react to Latour’s

Heidegerrian paean to “authenticity” with instant
suspicion about its reactionary connotations—just as they
recently repudiated Heidegger’s intellectual heir Giorgio
Agamben for his critical stance toward the science around
Covid. All of this points to the degeneration of critical
theory from the intellectual autonomy and prestige it
enjoyed during Latour’s earlier career to the coalitionally
subordinate position it occupies now.

Jacob Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and the

author of Transportation and Revolt and Giants of the Monsoon Forest.

@JacobAShell ↗

More like this

#Bruno Latour #critical theory #science #climate

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