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What is Science

Critique? Lessig, Latour, Foucault

Part 1

Philip Mirowski

March 2015

Version 1.0

Keynote address to Workshop on the Changing Political Economy of Research and

Innovation, UCSD, March 2015

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Science studies seems to be experiencing a mid-life crisis these days. This crisis is a bit

different from the adolescent episode it suffered through in the 1990s, when some scientists

threatened to take away the car keys and kick the miscreants out of the house of academe if they

didnt learn to shape up and show some respect. (Yes, I am talking about the Science Wars.)

Back then, as adolescents often eventually do, a large segment of 4S did proceed to sober up and

learn deference to the scientists, often to the point of signing on to their grants; while a smaller

subset just took their rebellion underground, hiding in their rooms and listening to forbidden

hipster siren songs or death metal, at least until they were old enough to get tenure. One or two

acted like they were the modern reincarnation of James Dean, never a wise choice. Time and

fashion did the rest; although a few science studies departments had been unceremoniously

disbanded, mostly the field became increasingly popular in academe in the interim, growing in

numbers and in administrative clout, not least because of its bad girl reputation amongst those

who didnt actually have to endure the adolescent episode. Thus did science studies become

more mature, and began to thrive.

Now, having reached middle age, a different malaise has infected 4S. While much of the

rest of this exercise is an attempt to diagnose its nature and causes, I should instead like to

initially characterize it with a personal anecdote. I have been teaching a revamped course on

How Drugs are Created and How they Create Us, which has been fun, because so many

different disciplines vie to get a piece of that pie by asserting that they have the best, truest, most

perceptive understanding of the pharmaceutical industry and the pharmaceuticalized populace.

As has been my inclination, I sought to structure the syllabus ultimately around a few science

studies texts, the better to maintain some distance from the disciplinary demands of economists,

the medical profession, bioethicists, geneticists, pharmacists, lawyers, sociologists, clinicians,

historians of medicine, chemists, political theorists, . It is a cacophony, and some principles of

organization must be imposed to ward off dizziness in the students. And I want to preface my

remarks with the observation that the work of Joseph Dumit, Sergio Sismondo, Jill Fisher, John

Abraham and Courtney Davis have been far and away some of the most insightful texts on the

topic of drugs. They work just fine in the course. I assigned that work because it gives strong

clear narrative lines to the mass of empirical observation of modern Pharma practices.

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And yet. One of the things I kept stumbling over in preparing the course was that,

although these science studies scholars clearly realized that something had gone very wrong with

the contemporary Pharma industry and the Pharmaceutical science that went along with it, they

were notably loathe to draw any conclusions concerning what should be done about it. Of course

some of this is just scholarly prudence, but as I worked through the literature I began to suspect

something else was going on. It seemed to me there was a certain hesitancy concerning

confrontation of the politics of the situation, in the sense that these scholars and others really did

not want to be pressed on their assessments of what should be done about a situation which, in

their estimation, was getting worse the longer it persisted. Dumit was suggesting the very

concept of health was getting debased; Fisher suggested the subjects in clinical trials were being

badly abused; Sismondo repeatedly hinted the medical literature could not be trusted; Davis and

Abraham insist that drug regulation has been so compromised and undermined that it can no

longer promote public health. These would all seem to be eminently political statements, except

for the fact that no one was synthesizing the work of the others into a larger systematic whole,

and no one proposed some specific political program as a way to respond to the litany of bad

news. In this, they stood in sharp contrast to the various analysts of Pharma one usually

encountered in other disciplinary contexts, especially the natural scientists and economists, who

rather boldly and unself-consciously (and some would say naively) proposed targeted policy

interventions which they prophesied would serve to remedy the wrongs they had identified.

I do not mean to demean or besmirch the particular authors I have associated with this

lacuna; they took no personal pledge to set themselves up as instrumentalist social scientists; and

anyway, I believe it is symptomatic of something larger, the afore-mentioned mid-life crisis in

4S. It seems to me that 4S in general has lately become fairly confused about the role and

significance of science critique in pursuit of their studies, and the relationship to politics which

best suits their maintained self image as radical outsiders. One can detect this in the rapidly

expanding number of papers in Social Studies of Science and similar journals explicitly

concerned with abstract political theory; but I think it also comes close to the surface in a whole

raft of localized controversies within the field: for instance, the doctrine of performativity in

the social studies of finance;1 or the concept of agnotology in the literature on science

1 (MacKenzie et al, 2008).

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denialism;2 meditations upon the impact of the Internet on Science 2.0;

3 and of course, the

extensive literature on Pharma. In each of these literatures one can feel the baleful jaundiced

stance of conventional science critique, combined with a reticence to even register if there exists

some prospect of doing anything serious about rectifying the research programs in question. This

sometimes turns out to be the case even when the author explicitly inhabits a political activist

role in her real life.

What renders the silence doubly loud is that most papers in science studies do generally

attempt to signal allegiance to some theoretical tradition, usually in the preamble to what is

inevitably an otherwise empiricist project. One would expect that the theoretical preamble would

at least gesture toward the political position that would be implicit to the exercise, if only for the

sake of brevity. Yet these theorists seem to let our science studies authors down, because the

intentionality and significance of each paper or book is no more apparent at the end of the

exercise than it is when the theory was evoked. This even seems to be the case in the few rare

instances when the author sees fit to cite relatively classical social theorists, be they Marx or

Bourdieu or Tarde or Weber or (usually verboten) Merton or Boltanski and Chiapello. Rather,

the role of theory in modern STS appears more often than not to serve to break any direct

connection between empirical activity and politics, which may be one reason that so many STS

scholars feel uncomfortable with conventional sociological theory.

When one attempts to approach the possible links between science critique and political

action, the problem rapidly arises that much of the boundary work is implicit, in the form of

unspoken presumptions about society and the responsibilities and capabilities of the researcher.

It ranges from deep convictions concerning what political action may or may not accomplish, to

prior appreciations for the range of social phenomena one must take into account in order to

frame the possibilities of political action, to understandings of the relationships of knowledge to

power in something so small as a university department or a spontaneous demonstration, to

something so large as an NGO or a political party. To unpack the range of half-submerged

presuppositions turns out to be a daunting task, and often falls short. I am thinking here of the

repeated attempts by Philip Kitcher to produce a canonical statement of the correct liberal

relationships of democratic government to the scientific community, which somehow managed

2 (Fernandez Pinto 2015)

3 (Morozov, 2013)

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to ignore just about every modern pathology identified by contemporary science critique, by

projecting the ideal economic agent onto his notion of well-ordered science.4

Rather than carry on caricaturing the entire 4S community, I would therefore like to

examine three important theorists of the role of critique in the study of science. They are Larry

Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Michel Foucault. I recognize that two out of three are not often

portrayed as participating in the conversation within science studies; however, it is a little-

appreciated fact that all three were heavily influenced by neoliberal political thought, a fact

which makes them easier to compare and contrast.

The main reason to meditate on these three figures is that they each, in different ways,

attempt to respond to the challenge: If one accepts some version of a social constructivist

approach to the generation of scientific knowledge, then what should be the implications for

political action in the rough and tumble world of power and money? Now, many activists from

Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein feel that they can sidestep this problem simply by treating

contemporary natural sciences as occupying a special status, subject to a dispensation wherein

challenge and critique is not an option; these people tend to be the stock figures of recent history

who disparage Postmodernism out of hand, thinking they can effortlessly don the mantle of

Truth without fear of contradiction or confusion. For them, everything is simply as prosaic as

they insist things seem. They claim to deploy good science to defeat their political enemies,

although such victories do seem few and far between as we get ever closer to the present. It

seems potent for many political activists, but that is not a serious option for science studies, for

however diverse in traditions, the field nevertheless tends to be united in a self-image of

vanguard critique of science and scientists.

The utter failure of using good science as a club to beat your opponents in an era when

science itself has become an adjunct of money and power for instance, in the widespread use of

supposed anti-denialism to gag the anti-GMO movement5 , or appeals to scientific open-

mindedness on the part of the geoengineering crowd6 -- would seem to signal that the time has

arrived to revisit a few landmark theorists of science critique.

4 See Kitcher (1993, 2001, 2011).

5 See Tim Wise, The War on GM Food Critics at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/war-

genetically-modified-food-critics.html ; and http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/monsanto-wants-to-know-

why-people-doubt-science/ 6 See (Stilgoe, 2015)

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Thus the question of the relationship of science critique to political activity is one of the

most persistently nagging problems of the modern era. It may help to frame the question by

looking at a few archetypical responses to the problem.

Larry Lessig

Because Lawrence Lessig lives in a rarified world of Supreme Court litigation and TED

talks, almost no one in science studies apparently takes him seriously as a reference point when it

comes to the questions of science critique and political activism. I would suggest the time has

come to rethink that, since in many ways, he is exemplary of a certain model of living in the

world of constructivist science and antagonistic politics. Perhaps the reason most of his fans

overlook the constructivist side of his knowledge politics is that his commitments in this regard

were broached well before he got famous, soon after he took his first job at the University of

Chicago Law School.7 Furthermore, almost all his lauded contributions actually make extensive

reference to the history (and to a lesser extent, sociology) of science, because he has been

obsessed with the way controversies over knowledge become baked into political practice.

Larry Lessig is a Harvard Law School Professor who initially became famous for his

book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). While not often cited in science studies

circles, this book retailed an idea that had been commonplace in science studies back in that era,

namely, that seemingly neutral technological artifacts could embody and enforce certain political

projects, often without the citizen user being aware that they were being subjected to discipline

and regimentation behind their backs, so to speak. In Code, Lessig plays upon the technical and

legal definitions of code in an attempt to collapse the distinction between the design and

implementation of computer programs that facilitate communicationand as a result define it

and the regulatory role that law has traditionally played. He argued therefore that computer code

needs to be subject to the same kind of scrutiny, accessibility, and malleability that one might

initially hope is characteristic of our system of laws. Mostly, things have trended in the opposite

direction in the interim, which adds piquancy to his saga, since he has had to come to terms with

how and whether to carry on political activism when one is on the losing side.

7 See especially (Lessig, 1995).

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Code was a champion of constructivist studies of technology, perhaps even avant la

lettre. Code is never found, it is only ever made, and only ever made by us (2006, p.6). There

he posited the difference between a first generation Internet, forged by noncommercial

academics, and a second stage in the 1990s, largely engineered by commercial interests; he

warned of a third generation starting to be imposed by an alliance between government and

commerce, which would reverse the earlier open architecture. Here he sounded like a more

subdued but better dressed Trevor Pinch: all of us must learn at least enough to see that

technology is plastic (2006, p.32). Even at this early stage, he was conflicted about the role of

money and corporate power in this constructivist project: When commercial interests determine

architecture, they create a kind of private law. But then he immediately backtracked: I am not

against private enterprise; my strong presumption in most cases is to let the market produce

(2006. P.77). Significantly, in light of our comparison of Lessig to Latour and Foucault, his

attempt to extricate himself from this bind was to appeal to some vaguely defined notion of

power: the architecture of cyberspace is power in this sense; how it could be different. Politics

is about how we decide, how that power is exercised, and by whom (p.78). Lessig seems

oblivious to the long and tortured heritage of a decisionist approach to political theory.

Lessig, perhaps more than a raft of other commentators on the cosmic significance of the

Internet, did seem to capture the Zeitgeist back then. He deftly managed to combine the staid

demeanor of the law professor with the rebellious stance of the hacker, primarily because he

tended (at that stage) to locate the nexus of conflict of code as law with computer code at the

point of copyright in particular, and intellectual property more broadly.8 He presented himself as

a champion of Free Culture and amateur artist mashups in the early 2000s, reinforced with just

enough in the way of case law to maintain his street cred. Whereas others were concerned with

furtive attempts to steal music and movies online, he was inclined to justify the Wild West

atmosphere of the Web back then as a more noble actualization of knowledge and creativity. He

was hip enough to realize that the old liberal prescription that, if you see an injustice then just

pass a new law might appear a little misguided when the very character of law was being

upended by technology and the wicked rebellion of rebellious artists; but in the end, true to form,

he capitulated to that very same logic by helping establish the Creative Commons Foundation,

8 One can observe this in his role as observer in the movie The Internets Own Boy: the story of Aaron

Schwartz.

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and to institute the Creative Commons license, sometimes known as copyleft. He even issued a

revised version of Code under the open license, making it available for free over the Internet.9

Lessig often paid as much attention to format as to content; he was also one of the first to turn

the staid academic powerpoint lecture into a marvel of audiovisual wizardry, realizing that

political speech is a form of performance. As Osnos writes, His style is so widely imitatedhis

TED talks have drawn millions of viewsthat its become known as the Lessig method. The

man who made An Inconvenient Truth, about Al Gores efforts to draw attention to climate

change, describes Lessigs typical presentation as a preachers sermon with an audiovisual

team behind it.

One of the qualities that made him a cultural rock star is that his audience on the Left

immediately warmed to him as one of their own that is, someone who shared their nominal

liberal convictions; but the lights and mashups and pizzazz tended to distract from his actual

politics. Those of neoliberal inclinations or experience would fairly quickly detect that the man

who clerked for Richard Posner (MPS member) at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for

Antonin Scalia (AEI, Federalist Society) on the Supreme Court was anything but politically

correct. His early matriculation at the University of Chicago Law School was worn on his sleeve,

for those who knew something about politics. While not stridently consistent, his basic

orientation has been expressed repeatedly in interviews:

His father was an ardent Republican, wary of government regulation, and Lessig became a

devout member of the National Teen Age Republicans. He later ran the campaign of a candidate for the state senate, and lost, halting his budding career in Republican politics. He

said, I was a libertarian. I still think Im a libertarian; its just that I understand the conditions in which liberty can flourish. Its liberty where you have the infrastructures of society that make it possible, and one of the elements is a certain commitment to equality. I vote like a

Democrat now. To libertarians, Lessig makes a related case against the influence of big money. Americans are deprived of liberty today because, he says, the government is dependent on the few and not on the many. (Osnos, 2014)

In the manner so beloved by Americans, he displays the insouciant tendency to run

together fundamentally incompatible political positions libertarian, neoliberal, egalitarian in

part because he believes it is his quest to somehow transcend common dichotomies of Left and

9 See (Lessig, 2006). Subsequent quotes in this paragraph come from (Osnos, 2014).

8

Right.10

While I personally would not judge him very successful in this regard, it should be noted

that this pretense to tinker with and transcend handed-down notions of political categories is

characteristic of each of the three thinkers dealt with in this paper. The standard divisions of

political action with their preset functional personae and faux-spatial symmetries would naturally

seem indentured fetters to those bent upon rethinking science critique.

Sometime in the mid-2000s, Lessig lost confidence that his pursuit of the technicalities of

intellectual property in cyberspace were actually addressing the really big injustices in the real

world, or even the root problems of power as deployed through knowledge. More to the point, he

began to realize that he had to theorize why it was he so often lost previous battles over narrow

legal issues which he had believed were simple and straightforward, in particular, in the context

of disputes over science critique:

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming

Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have

been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political

system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part

of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a corruption of) the political process. That our government cant understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding. This is a thought Ive often had in the debates Ive been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a

public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton

Friedman put it, a no brainer. As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification

could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose. Yet governments

continue to push ahead with this idiot idea both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

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What he had come to realize was that science/technology critique plus the sorts of

political engagement one would expect of a Harvard Law Professor pleading cases before the

court, giving talks and building institutions like the Creative Commons Licensewere not

remotely sufficient when it came to seriously plotting political strategy to win; one should not

simply rest satisfied with the noble gesture. One had to begin to understand the structural causes

which guaranteed that his opponents would prevail; and that included the structural causes

behind the very nature of technological knowledge itself.

10

One observes this in his recent book (Lessig, 2011), but more significantly, in his 2014 Berlin lectures at

Chicago: https://berlinfamilylectures.uchicago.edu/page/video-gallery 11

Lessig blog, June 2007 at: http://www.lessig.org/2007/06/required-reading-the-next-10-y-1/

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Lessig thus has come to exemplify what I consider one of the main contemporary

political responses to the problems thrown up by the sneaking suspicions of failure of science

critique. He has opted to locate the failure of major institutions as a matter of corruption of the

institutions in question. This may have grown out of an attempt to draft him personally to run for

Congress, which he decided was a futile path after giving it some consideration. Initially, Lessig

seemed to believe that Internet technology could serve as an effective counterweight to political

corruption, for instance by setting up a dedicated Wiki to encourage people to report instances of

corrupt Congressional behavior. But just as he was getting started, the Citizens United v. Federal

Election Commission decision was handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010, accepting that

campaign contributions were a somewhat modulated form of political speech, and striking down

limits on corporate contributions. It brought home to Lessig that raw power was reconfiguring

the very meaning of knowledge, in pursuit of a Machiavellian approach to politics. From

thenceforth, his activist inclinations resulted in increasingly quixotic projects to supposedly root

out the corrupt elements from the US Congress, combined with an intellectual project to explain

how he might believe that money was the root of this corruption.

It should be made abundantly clear that the neoliberal icons that mentored Lessig would

never allow that money could be a corrupting influence: not on people, not on governments, and

certainly not on knowledge and technology. His most recent book Republic, Lost and his 2014

Berlin Family Lectures are attempts to somehow square the circle of remaining a neoliberal

fellow traveler and simultaneously preaching hellfire concerning the corruption of American

politics. The most famous of these attempts was launched as a counterintuitive experiment: the

Mayday PAC, launched in 2012, a political-action committee that would spend millions of

dollars in 2014 in an attempt to elect congressional candidates who are intent on passing

campaign-finance reformand to defeat those who are not. It was a super PAC designated to

drive other PACs into extinction. Stephen Colbert had done something similar, but Lessig did not

approach it as a pedagogic stunt, but rather a serious expression of one of his core beliefsit

would take serious money to defeat serious money, he insisted. He tapped the hipster crowd by

setting up a Kickstarter campaign for small donations. He himself spent substantial time hitting

up large donors, and adopted the motto Embrace the irony.

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In a bracing lesson for postmodern irony, the Mayday PAC was a crashing failure in

2014. Almost none of the candidates supported were elected.12

The question that was hard to

avoid after the debacle was how much of this was bad luck, and how much of it should be

attributed to some fundamental flaws in the political theory that undergirded the Lessig crusade.

Not unexpectedly, a believer in the fundamental plasticity of technology was inclined to

propound that political and Internet technologies could be readily adapted to support his position:

Youve got Uber, which is the picture of innovation that gets stopped by all these local rent-

seekers who have their taxi medallions. That is the dynamic weve got to change. Mayday, he

said, was a game-changing bet. This is what Silicon Valley loves.13 However, it has to be

pointed out that Uber does not itself exist to root out evil corruption, unless, of course, one is a

diehard believer in neoliberalism. Rather, it exists to undermine worker protections by using

temp labor to undercut existing wage and price guarantees, plus have a few venture capitalists

get rich off the process of destruction. Weirdly, Lessigs own crusade was the furthest thing from

creative destruction one might imagine. Lessigs embrace of corruption as the central

problem of modern politics more or less dictates that the modality of reform involves tinkering

with existing rules and technologies to get at the pockets of decay and malfeasance which are

their nominal target, while avoiding considerations of overall market functioning and structures.

Most likely, it would end up as an utterly futile appeal to an empty shell of morality.

This brings us to the recent Berlin Family Lectures of 2014, where Lessig engages in an

extended bout of science critique that warrants being brought to the attention of many in the

science studies community. Lessig candidly admits in lecture 1 that copyrightthe very topic

that made him famous in his early careerdoesnt really matter much in the larger scheme of

things. Whereas the first lecture proceeds to reiterate much of his previous concern over

Congressional corruption, the other three lectures deal more explicitly with the corruption of

knowledge, and in particular, a critique of Big Pharma and modern psychiatry. Lecture 2 starts

with the interesting admission that, I am a relativist about institutional corruption. He attempts

to clarify that he is not particularly interested in moral failure on the part of individual actors, but

rather, Influence, within an economy of influence, that weakens the effectiveness of an

institution, especially by weakening public trust in that institution. Skating somewhat close to

12

The actual number elected was 2 out of eight supported by Mayday PAC. Some Monday-morning

quarterbacking suggested that the money might have been irrelevant in those cases. 13

(Osnos, 2014)

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tautology, Lessig then defines corruption as these forms of influence diverting the operation of

the institution away from its (stated or inherent) purposes. Although this sequence of definitions

studiously avoids all mention of money, every single example in his lectures explicitly considers

money as the instrumentality through which an institution is corrupted.

A better grasp of Lessigs notions of corruption may be obtained from surveying his

examples scattered throughout the lectures. In Lecture 2 on the financial sector, he considers that

Moodys and the other ratings agencies had become corrupted through the introduction of the

business model where issuers of mortgage derivatives paid the ratings agencies to rate the quality

of their instruments. Lessig explicitly says that the purpose of those institutions was to provide

objective truth, and it was that purpose which had been undermined and corrupted in the runup to

the global economic crisis. Interestingly, he blames this change on the government in general and

the SEC, which he claims sought to outsource their own regulatory activities to the ratings

agencies. In this particular instance, he seems not to notice that the precept that money can

corrupt knowledge is a major contradiction with the heart of the neoliberal project, something he

covers up by endorsing the neoliberal talking point that the causes of the crisis all lay in

government activities. I will simply remind the audience that the first commandment of the

neoliberal thought collective is that markets constitute the greatest information processor known

to mankind, and never mislead participants about the truth.14

A better example comes in Lecture

4, dedicated to corruption in academia, when he relates a story he claims to have derived from

the work of historians of science Robert Whittaker and Lisa Cosgrove.15

There Lessig relates the story of the American Psychiatric Association, which sought to

displace an earlier Freudian theoretical stance with what would be perceived as a more

scientific theraupeutic regimen associated with the infamous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

of Mental Disorders16

. Basically, Lessig suggests the profession of psychiatrists came to depend

very heavily upon drug companies to fund their attempts to stabilize diagnostic definitions in the

DSM, and by so doing, ended up inventing all manner of dubious illnesses so that drug regimens

would be defined as their remedy, and consequently, such that insurance companies would

recognize those diseases and reimburse patients and psychiatrists for the drug prescriptions.

Lessig accuses the APA of corruption, given that money led to dereliction of duty in learning

14

(Mirowski, 2013, chapter 2). 15

See (Whittaker & Cosgrove, 2015). 16

For further consideration of the most recent DSM V, see (Hacking, 2013).

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about the truth when it came to human mental illness. In his opinion, public loss of trust in

psychiatry is justified, insofar as the profession has lost sight of its true aim, which is bringing to

light the truth about mental illness, whether it benefits the profession or not.

It is interesting that Lessig never once compares his own position in this regard to one of

the landmark philosophers of mental illness, Michel Foucault. It is not as though Lessig is totally

unaware of Foucaults pertinenceindeed, he briefly mentioned Foucault in his maiden article

on social constructivism in the problem of knowledge:

Other theories of social meaning take a less activist approach. Jack Balkin, for example, offers

an extremely rich account of the evolution of social meaning, understood as a process through

which the cultural software of individuals changes through time. Michel Foucaults work is another example, though his is an account focused less on meaning, and more on the

meticulous observation of detail constructing structures of power and discipline in social life. My account is less general than these. (Lessig, 1995)

The problem, here as elsewhere in Lessigs work, is that the diagnostic of corruption

actually diverts attention from the multiple structures of power at play in any high-stakes project

of the stabilization of knowledge. While the relevance of insurance companies and Big Pharma

to the DSM should not be denied, Lessig flinches at the notion that one might equally be obliged

to look into the state of play of neuroscience at the relevant junctures, and changing notions of

disease that were feeding into the dynamic. Foucault notoriously denied there was any fixed

entity for a diagnosis of mental illness to home in upon, and that notions of madness were

heavily conditioned by the states relationship to the maintenance of the non-able bodied worker,

to religious notions of saintly wisdom, and the like. In the Q&A after the lecture, Lessig openly

speculates (with nothing in the way of proof or evidence) that this form of corruption of

diagnosis is more of a problem in the human sciences, and that the natural sciences do not

encounter similar problems in the stabilization of knowledge. Strangely for one so concerned to

be identified as constructivist, he simply rules out the possibility that ongoing changes in the

structure of science funding might begin to shift the attention, content and validation procedures

across the gamut of science itself. In other words, it is too easy to posit truth as the unwavering

purpose of an institution, without consideration of how the institutional purpose becomes revised

as the target entity itself undergoes revision.

One must acknowledge that Lessig does not wish to indict specific persons in the history

of the institutions that he condemns; his is not the politics of skapegoats. He is an advocate of the

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position that people are not generally evil when corrupt; they are just weak of will and perception

when it comes to their ability to see and resist corruption. It is not so much that Lessig buys into

the stock American image of flawed institutions staffed with moral and epistemic angels; rather,

he favors the Chicago version of so-called behavioral economics, where humans are portrayed

as flawed thinkers when compared to some neoclassical notion of complete rationality. One

might suspect that such pervasive human cognitive biases might present some problems for any

simple notion of an external truth, but Lessig rapidly passes that by, in favor of citing cognitive

weakness as the supposed reason why the actors internal to the institution will not bring about

their own reforms from within. In a very Chicago move, it is the political task of people like

Lessig (and fellow lawyer Cass Sunstein) to nudge the actors back toward the straight and

narrow. Reputedly, No one is coerced, because Lessig and his followers are just restoring their

political subjects back to the path they supposedly wanted all along. Rather conveniently, the

definition of politics predicated on the friend/enemy distinction is banished from all

consideration.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Lessigs thought for people in the social studies of

science is the content and character of his proposed remedies and nudges. Here in Lecture 5 he

sets out an important precept: from his perspective, policies that induce transparency

concerning conflicts of interest will do little or nothing to mitigate corruption. Lessig posits that

awareness of conflicts, which in his examples mostly refer to money payments, will have no

impact if the actors involved have no idea what to do about their predicament. Here Lessig the

constructivist re-emerges, with suggestions that disclosures may alter the social relationships of

the persons involved, and not necessarily is a good way. Knowing who holds the purse strings

will not remedy cognitive biases infecting various audiences, such as flagging attention by the

public as to who pays for what, lack of contextual background for nonspecialists, easy

manipulation of public through framing of rhetorical techniques, the existence of virtual threats

and emoluments, the moral license problem,17

and more.

Lessig argues against the grain that induced ignorance may actually offset conflicts of

interest more effectively than full disclosure.18

In particular, he argues that if choice of experts in

pronouncing on policies were fully blinded in the sense that competing parties were equally

17

Here disclosure increases the bad behavior on the perpetrator, while making the bamboozled believe that

they are wise to cooperate with the perpetrator. See (Loewenstein et al, 2012). 18

Extolling the virtues of ignorance is an especially poignant neoliberal theme. See (Mirowski, 2013).

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uncertain who would be chosen to pronounce upon the truth (perhaps by some randomized

process), or precisely how it would be validated, then the credibility and legitimacy of the

outcome would be substantially greater than in a pure adversarial system. Note well, Lessig does

not seek to devolve expertise to some independent public agency; experts are still paid by the

parties, pay to play is still the coin of the realm, and knowledge is still fully commercialized.

Lessig nods toward the work of one of his Safra Center colleagues Marc Rodwin, who has laid

out the case for a similar scheme for pharmaceutical clinical trials.19

Rodwin rejects older statist

schemes of independence, such as the NIH or academics paid by the government enjoined to

directly conduct independent clinical trials. Instead, he proposes a more neoliberal response:

short of totally randomly assigning for-profit CROs to individual drug firms to conduct trials,

reformers could instead develop a separate regulatory structure which would dictate which CRO

could perform which clinical trial, with research protocols also dictated by some outside agency.

Rodwin is especially enthusiastic about the imposition of some percentage cap on the amount of

trials any CRO might do for Pharma firms. Presumably, diversity in clientele would tend to

encourage greater independence and desire to foster a truth less tied to the pursestrings of those

calling the tune.

Although Lessig and his colleagues never got around to closely considering the quality of

science actually published in the professional journal literature, it seems there exists a parallel

reform movement that reasons along much the same lines. While acknowledging that many

indicators of the medical literature suggest the quality of reports are degeneratingrising rates

of retraction, rampant ghost authorship, the gross exaggerations of statistical significance, and so

onsome activists have proposed similar piecemeal reforms reminiscent of the Lessig crusade.

Perhaps the best exemplar of this tendency is John Ioannidis at the Stanford University Medical

School. In the past, Ioannidis had argued that the preferred counter to the corruption of research

is the implementation of a few statistical and research protocols, such as the randomization and

blinding discussed by Lessig and Rodwin, the regular application of meta-analysis, and the

imposition of what he considers to be correct statistical algorithms. In this previous incarnation,

he appeared the rather conventional champion of intensified technical protocolsin laymans

terms, more baroque data massaging -- to automatically guarantee truth. However, more recently,

Ioannidis shows signs of realizing his anti-corruption campaign might require something a bit

19

See (Rodwin, 2015).

15

stronger in the way of social engineering than simple statistical technocracy (Ioannidis, 2014).

Box 1 enumerates some of his proposed reforms:

Source: (Ioannidis, 2014)

On the face of it, many of these rather generic reforms sound reasonable, until one starts

to delve into the fine structure of details of what it means to counter the corruption of the

scientific process. For instance, large scale collaboration in the modern setting often cashes out

as the deskilling and fine division of labor prosecuted through proprietary internet platforms,

often sold to unwary as Science 2.0. Under these auspices, intellectual property is far easier to

control, and therefore, results are more easily skewed to the interest of the funders.20

Or consider

the supposed content of a replication culture. It is a watchword of science studies that airtight

replications are almost impossible to perform, because the decision as to what it means for an

experimental setup to be the same is itself a passel of auxiliary hypotheses with near-infinite

flexibility; and in any event, all the rewards and penalties of replication behavior are such that

the incentives are arrayed against a replicator, as opposed to someone claiming to extend and

amend the results.21

The attempt to mandate registration of all clinical trials on the government

website clinicaltrials.gov is pretty widely conceded to have been a failure, at least within the

20

See Mirowski, Science 2.0 presentation to CPERI, York Univ., 2014 21

See (Mirowski, 2004, chap. Xx) and (Collins, 1992).

16

medical literature.22

In a world of science riddled with Materials Transfer Agreements, the very

notion of sharing has been encumbered with all manner of contractual revisions, and thus

deformed beyond recognition.23

The very structure of peer review has been undergoing profound

re-engineering in the last decade, much of it rejiggered to capture profit from labor that had been

performed for free prior to the spread of social media and the movement of journals online. None

of these changes seem to have been instituted with the express goal of making scientific

research more true; mostly, they are driven instead by a quest to render it more profitable.

Of course, Ioannidis is vaguely aware of this, although one wonders about Lessig.

Ioannidis concludes his article:

The fine-tuning of existing policies and more disruptive and radical interventions should be

considered, but neither presence nor absence of revolutionary intent should be taken as

reliable surrogate for actual impact. There are many different scenarios for the evolution of

biomedical research and scientific investigation in general, each more or less compatible with

seeking truthfulness and human well-being. (Ioannidis, 2014, p.5)

Ioannidis does understand that an imperious injunction to banish all possible conflicts of

interest would render published scientific research bland and uninteresting; but the sleeping

policeman where he stumbles is located more or less in the same place as Lessig: truth for them

seems to exist peacefully outside all these structures that exist to unearth and validate it. The

relationship of social structures to knowledge is many-to-one for both of them, rather than many-

to-many. Some institutional structures may seem corrupt from their dual vantage point, but

supposedly, the definition and content of truth remains impervious to both the rapscallion and the

overweening hubris of the crusading reformer. Both Lessig and Ioannidis cannot be bothered to

separate out the True and the Useful from the Profitable, because that would necessarily involve

consideration of the neoliberal construct of the Market as the ideal processor of all human

knowledge, more powerful than any individual scientist or intellectual. Perhaps the misbegotten

character of our institutions is not simply chalked up to corruption, but rather, and integral part

of the business plan. Maybe some market processes exist to make people more ignorant; indeed,

that is the major insight of the literature on Agnotology.24

This recognition, in turn, would carry

Lessig and Ioannidis far outside their normal comfort zones, the boundaries of which are

22

See (Fisher et al, 2014; Viergever et al, 2014). 23

See (Mirowski, 2011, pp.152-181). 24

(See Fernandez-Pinto, 2015).

17

constituted by the belief that only more money can counter the putative ill effects of old money.

As Lessig says, we are enjoined to embrace the irony.

Bruno Latour

I want to explore the possibility that, although most science studies authors are pretty

oblivious to Larry Lessig and his writings, their unexamined everyday default political beliefs

probably come fairly near to those exemplified by Lessig. By stark contrast, the theorist they

most frequently explicitly cite in the introductions to their papers, Bruno Latour, does not at first

blush represent or otherwise stand as iconic proxy for many of their political predispositions, if

only because a vanishing minority of science studies writers appear to possess a firm grasp on

what it is that is particularly political about Latours voluminous writings.

It would seem on the face of it that it should not be such a stretch to understand more or

less what the appellation Chateau Latour on the label means, given that Latour the lecturer is

all over YouTube, and maintains a lively website.25

It is a daunting task to keep up with all his

projects, art installations, feuilletons, web MOOC, media appearances, and so forth; he relishes

his translation across the contemporary disciplines. But the downside of someone as prolific an

author as Latour is that he has changed his tune quite a bit over time, without either openly

acknowledging that fact, or even giving signposts how his key terms have changed their

meaning. There is a phenomenon that he has been conventionally associated with called actor-

network theory; but with his usual genial humor, he repudiated both the term and the project

decades ago. In a 1999 workshop called "Actor Network and After", Bruno Latour was noted to

say that there are four things wrong with actor-network theory: "actor", "network", "theory" and

the hyphen.26

This joke seems not to have dented his popularity much, probably because there

was so little of substance in ANT in the first place; no one but the meanest hobgoblins of

consistency have been sorry to see it go. In his most recent and abstract philosophical treatise,

ANT-style networks are downgraded to merely one of fourteen separate modes of existencea

very deft way to repudiate some inconvenient earlier doctrines.

Furthermore, the science studies community has persisted in feting him for their own;

but the fact of the matter is that since his early books Laboratory Life and The Pasteurization of

25

Consult http://www.bruno-latour.fr ; for some YouTube lectures, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i-

ZKfShovs ; the MOOC is at: https://www.france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/courses/SciencesPo/ 26

See (Law & Hassard, 1999).

18

France (1988), there has been no longer any science to speak of in any of his voluminous

writings. After a quarter century, one might have thought someone in STS might have noticed.

While repeatedly pontificating about the abstract character of science and its social surround,

Latour evidently no longer pays any attention to how science is actually prosecuted on the

ground in this, or any other era. From time to time, he may give a shout out to certain historians

of science or STS scholars; but it never gets much beyond name-dropping. In this, he resembles a

certain style of professional philosopher, which is no accident, as we shall explore below.

Latour often lectures (and writes) as though he were giving a TED talk, but somehow

absent the usual son et lumire effects, which is quite an accomplishment. 27

He has the knack of

not ever making anything seem very complicated, but maintaining the correct modicum of

Parisian obscurity nonetheless.28

He claims to address scholars in the humanities and social

sciences, which is just as well, since most natural scientists dont even accord him the time of

day. Many nonscientists are drawn to the man because he has the air of someone on some sort of

reformist crusade; but perhaps the most important thing about the comparison of Latour to a

figure like Lessig is that there is no evidence of any political activism whatsoever in his

numerous public appearances. In the last few years, one must acknowledge that Latour has taken

to speaking with some fervor concerning global warming and against economics; but whether

this has any palpable scientific or political consequences is something we shall explore below.

There is no (humanly!) concise way to summarize Latours oeuvre, and in any event,

there has grown up around it a secondary literature which attempts to distill and bottle him for

the uninitiated.29

I shall undoubtedly not do this literature justice by simply suggesting that

Latour first gained fame by pointing out, quite correctly, that much of modern culture is based

upon the presupposition that Nature and Society are thoroughly separate entities; but, in practice,

they were so entangled that the distinction amounted to little of consequence. Latour was of

course not the first to insist upon this point, but he was certainly the most entertaining author to

drive the notion home to a broad audience, especially in his Science in Action. Less noticed is the

belief in the self as a distributed network of experiences and relationships was also a French

avant-garde obsession in the postwar period, from Alain Robbe-Grillet to Georges Perec.

27

This has been rectified recent SciencesPo introductory course: https://www.france-universite-numerique-

mooc.fr/courses/SciencesPo/05004S02/Trimestre_1_2015/courseware/748395737cb343f1a2e43716e755e65f/5fb9a9

b6559b41f3908bf340611ec394/ 28

Hekman (2009, p.437) hits the nail on the head: Clarity is not his strong suit. 29

See, for instance, (Harman, 2009; McGee, 2014).

19

Neoliberals like Hayek were also playing around with connectionist metaphors for human action

while Latour was still in short pants. Hence there was little novel in the components that

eventually went into the (dare I say it) construction of Latours constructivist crusade; what

mattered was how those elements were recombined, reoriented and played out in the nascent

field of science studies. Quoting Latour, Society is constructed, but not socially constructed.

(1999, p.198)

Latour so frequently operates on the meta level of the philosopher in his published

writings, that one must repair to his more pedagogic contexts, such as his MOOC on Scientific

Humanism to observe just what kind of doctrines he would nominally support concerning social

thought. Figure 2 is taken from that source, and reveals someone of rather conventional Comtist

ambitions, leavened with a heavy dose of technological determinism embodied in an

idiosyncratic stage theory. Auguste Comte, like Bruno Latour, was famous for insisting that

20

philosophy of science could not be separated from political philosophy. Indeed, Latours career

even seems to follow the rough trajectory of Comte: In the Course, Comte said, science was

transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. This may

become important later, when we enquire into the sorts of political activity he supports in

practice.

Latours opponents were characterized by him not as standard Realists, but in a

presumptuous ploy, as the Moderns, at least from 1993 onwards.30 Whom it may transpire that

belongs in the category Modern has turned out to be extremely vague, but this is because

Latour has never really been interested in history. What has become clearer in numerous

repetitions of this point over two decades was that the targets in his sights were those who lived

by the credo that critique had real consequences. In any number of repetitive diagrams consisting

of circles, boxes and arrows, Latour preached that science critique and later, religious critique

and political critiquewere ineffectual because they purportedly undermined themselves. In

Modern Cult Latour retails this theme as if from the viewpoint of a Western anthropologist:

When Moderns encounter the alien Other, they disparage the beliefs of the Others that their

human-made fetishes possess divine powers. The Moderns think they know that it is Nature that

produces the mystical effects instead, and by revealing this through critique, they bequeath true

power to the Human Other. But then, says Latour, the critique of the Moderns turns upon itself;

supposedly objective causes determine the newly freed individual Humans, reducing them to

mere pawns of metaphysical forces beyond their control. So much for the liberationist promise of

critique. Really, says Latour, the Moderns have all along been no different from the Other.

Critique operates through dualisms, deceit and sleight of hand; the Moderns delude themselves

and the Others with their own fetishes of Nature and Society. The right way to think about

things, hints Latour, is to devolve to the status of the Other: the ontology of reality should be

considered a flat horizon or, if you prefer, and arbitrary topology of assemblages and networks

defined by local interestswhich is equally constructed and pre-existent from the perspectives

of other actants. They do it; we do it; success or failure comes in the resultant trials of strength.

Critique is the disease; constructivism of this idiosyncratic vintage is the supposed cure.

30

It has occurred to me that Latour in effect reverses Comtes three stages, preaching a retrogression from the positive to the theological state.

21

Since social constructivism was a hot topic in STS in the 1980s and early 1990s, Latour

was often lumped together back then with other more purist constructivists, such as David Bloor,

Simon Schaffer and Harry Collins; but some early contretemps suggested he did not share their

English empiricist tendencies nor their constructivist interpretations. Indeed, what his erstwhile

fellow travelers had noted was a penchant for using economistic and/or Hobbesian metaphors

when attempting to describe what he insisted was going on in lab life. There were hints that the

way forward was to treat humans and non-humans on the same plane of contest and struggle; but

most people back then wrote this off as Francophone friskiness, a mere faon de parler, not

knowing to what extent they were expected to take it seriously. In the meantime, Latour gathered

around himself a small band of followers at the Paris Ecole de Mines; and was observed to be

propounding that they were acolytes of a new theory, the afore-mentioned actor network

theory. Perhaps the first lieutenant was Michel Callon; but numerous other platoon leaders were

John Law, Vincent Lepinay, Noortje Marres,

In my opinion, this was the juncture wherein Latour abandoned any semblance of work in

science studies as most had known it, and became an unapologetic academic philosopher. More

strikingly, he became the most armchair sort of philosopher, namely, the sort that propounded

grand theses about ontology and the nature of the Real. In France, the established philosophers

would not deign to usher him into their midst; but in a pattern frequently repeated in the late 20th

century, some Americans became besotted with a garbled version of French theory,31 which

otherwise fuelled his popularity. For instance, Latour visited at the Sociology Department at

UCSD in the mid-1980s, which by most accounts eventually did not go well from the viewpoints

of faculty. Many people have told me that Latour has always been more popular in the

Anglophone world than in Paris, although it is difficult to pin this down with plausible evidence.

In any event, starting with We Have Never been Modern (1993), he embarked on his trademark

habit of denouncing the Moderns, the postmodernists, sociologists, critique, dualism and a

whole host of other categories with distressingly intangible referents. More pertinent to present

concerns, Latour kept mentioning politics in oblique ways, but drew back at the precipice of

actually saying anything intelligible about political life. In particular, in Never been Modern he

cites 1989 as The Year of Miracles which he equates with the Fall of the Wall and the return of

the repressed breakdown of limitless Nature (no explicit discussion of global warming yet, mind

31

A story entertainingly recounted in (Cusset, 2008).

22

you) (1993, pp.8-9); he compares the failure of socialism with ecological obscurantism, and

although he cannot be bothered to explain of what either consisted, only to prescribe that the way

out of the dual debacles is to pretend as though nothing has ever really changed. This might

seem a sour prescription for lassitude, but Latour simply denies this: To notice that we have

never been modern and only minor divisions separate us from other collectives does not mean

that I am reactionary Seen as networks, however, the modern world, like revolutions, permits

scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation

of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small

modifications of old beliefs. (1993, pp.47-48). This political quietism, which could have been

propounded just as easily by Karl Popper decades before, starts out as a tiny seed in the 1990s,

but grows and grows over time to absorb much of Latours later work.

Thus, rather than to try and make sense of Latours ontological project, I will be

concerned here to trace out the serpentine rationale of his redoubled mentions of politics in his

later incarnations. This issue seems to have begun to bother some other writers in science

studies, and I am lucky to have their commentaries to hand so that I can make what might seem a

few rather bald generalizations, in pursuit of my comparative tropes.32

The place to start is to acknowledge that, if your maintained hypothesis was that ontology

is really flat, undifferentiated and pretty uniform in ways I have suggested, then you will have

serious problems getting most notions of politics off the ground. The artifactual and the divine,

the immanent and the transcendent, the scientific and the hermeneutic: they all melt into an

undifferentiated mush. If this ontology is thought to remain pretty constant over time, then

moreover, robust concepts of change will be even fewer and farther between than they had been

in the heyday of Structuralism.33

But furthermore, if your brief really means to suggest that

critique in the usual sense has been ineffectual and self-defeating, based upon old discredited

notions of fact and value that are holdovers from the Modernist period, then the pilot light of

much political mobilization has been snuffed at the outset. One of the more careful

commentators on Latours oeuvre seeks to square this circle by suggesting Latour has no

political aspirations:

32

Perhaps the best of these is (Harman, 2014), although more critical sources would include (Hekman,

2009; Martin, 2014;). 33

Even Harman, who is cheerfully styles himself an acolyte of Latour, admits this in (Latour et al, 2011,

p.37).

23

Latour is as resolutely non-modern in his politics as in everything else. He does not aspire to

rebuild the world in the shape of some particular idea of how things ought to be built (as the

Left generally wishes) Revolutionary aspirations in politics tend to go hand in hand with philosophical idealismswhich hold that truth is directly accessible to rational procedure. Latour is deeply committed to the notion that actors always outrun our conceptions of them

(Harman, 2014, p.31).

While this might seem to square with the dearth of direct evidence of Latour engaging in

political activities, it still rings false, especially given his increasingly alarmist articles

concerning global warming as we approach the present, not to mention the palpable fact that he

cannot cease and desist banging the table over and over again about how we must understand

science and politics in precisely the manner that he does. Furthermore, I doubt if most STS

scholars would understand their appropriation of his work as an open invitation to give up once

and for all on the sum total of their own personal political aspirations. There must be something a

bit more complicated going on here.

I believe the key to Latours political turn can be found in the period of strife known as

the Science Wars of the 1990s. This set of disputes, now fading in memory, consisted of a

number of scientists attacking what they considered to be garbled illegitimate commentary on

science on the part of postmodernists, literary folk and science studies scholars; we can pass the

details by here.34

However, Latour himself came in for a vicious onslaught by Alan Sokal and

Jean Bricmont in their Fashionable Nonsense (1998). Whether deserved or not, it clearly stung;

Latour was made to feel the Hobbesian war of all against all in a manner that got a bit deeper

under the skin than the polite academic disquisitions he had truck with prior to that juncture. At

roughly the same time, the general press had began to uncover various techniques of public

manipulation of knowledge on the part of neoliberal think tanks, in cases such as weapons of

mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war, the notorious tobacco strategy, and the first

waves of pushback towards the science of global warming. Journalists began to put the two

together: the doctrines of constructivism and the deployal of doubt on the part of the science

critics was deemed by Bricmont and others very similar to the techniques of doubt and

deconstruction practiced by the think tanks and Republican operatives like Frank Luntz. In a

travesty of events, some journalists accused STS of having taught the New Right these

techniques of obstruction and obfuscation.

34

See however the response of one of the targets:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/science-wars.html

24

It was this swirling sirocco of bad news that prompted Latour to pen his notorious screed,

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? As he wrote:

Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show the

lack of scientific certainty inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a primary issue. But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argumentor did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin.. Still, Id like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized

objective facts Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why cant I simply say the argument is closed for good? Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it

suits them and social construction when it suits them?... Or should we rather bring the sword

of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after

when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts? (2004a, p.227)

Of course, Latour had no intention of indulging in anything resembling a mea culpa.35

It

wasnt his fault, he pleaded; it was the fault of those Moderns, those deluded sociologists, and

finally, of critique itself. What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society,

discourse had outlived their usefulness? (2004a, p.229). Here the Latourist gives away an

impetuous resort to an ungrounded concept of usefulness, since it would appear to those still

encumbered by the lumbering yoke of the Modernist settlement that these techniques were

indeed apparently useful, at least in a political sense, to the think tanks, the ExxonMobils, the

George Bushes of the world. As expected, we are treated to some circles and arrows in Latours

talk that insist that critique based on dualisms must undo itself. Indeed, the bizarre practice of

attributing will and intentionality and cognition to featureless faceless monads while somehow

pronouncing upon winners and losers as if from a great height separated from the battle leads to

a brace of assertions lacking all referent and grounding:

[C]ritique was useless against objects of some solidityBut critique is also useless when it begins to use the results of one science uncritically, be it sociology itself, or economics, or

postimperialism, to account for the behavior of peopleObjects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak to be treated as indisputable causal explanations of

some unconscious action [Latour denounces] the pride of academia, the crme de la crme, who go on ceaselessly transforming the whole rest of the world into nave believers, into

fetishists, into hapless victims of domination, while at the same time turning them into the

mere superficial consequences of powerful hidden causalities coming from infrastructures

whose makeup is never interrogated? (2004a, pp.242-243)

35

In spite of my tone, I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to regret what I have done, to swear that I will never be a constructivist anymore (Latour, 2004a, p.231)

25

I am aware tu quoque is an inferior form of critique; but I am not the first to suggest that

Latour has learned an important lesson from the New Right: always accuse your opponent of

what you yourself are guilty of doing; and furthermore, try to be quick off the mark to get the

accusation in before your opponent twigs. Impudence wins the day, however unjust it may seem.

This is only the beginning of Latours appreciation of Machiavelli. In the above quote, whose

critique proved useless? Wasnt it in fact the critique of Latour and his cadres in science studies?

And whom precisely had been using economics uncritically in the early book Laboratory Life?

And what academic precisely dealt in powerful hidden causalities like the so-called Modernist

settlement whose makeup is never interrogated, because it never came within hailing distance of

any historical or empirical phenomena? If this seems a bit harsh, let me quote the more measured

version by Keir Martin:

For all that Latour attempts to set out his differences with structuralism, there is a sense in

which this aspect of his theory marks a continuation of an earlier form of antihumanism Although Latour abhors the social as a contextualizing device, the modernist settlement comes to act as such a contextual explanation, a structure by another name, a langue

determining the parole of minds trapped in a vat For all that Latour says we emerge in interaction with the nonhuman world, he has recourse to an ideological structure to explain

why we apparently constantly manage to convince ourselves otherwise. (2014, pp.13-14).

It appears that what Latour advocates in this circumloquacious (if not consciously

inconsistent) fashion is a type of politics that banishes science critique. Almost anyone who

comes into contact with Latours extensive web presence tends to notice this. In his MOOC on

Scientific Humanities, one of the first issues to arise with the students was to try and

understand Latours use of the term political. Students would bring up tense divisive issues,

and avuncular Bruno would turn them into anodyne translations, associations, plasmas, and

worse. Or, consider when the anthropologist Kim Fortun decided to survey Latours AIME

project (www.modesofexistence.org/) online, and compare it to the way that similar issues in

chemistry were dealt with on the website of the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade

and lobbyist association.

To some extent, Latour and the AIME project replay the resolute positivity of the ACC,

disavowing bad actors, conflicts of interest, and an array of externalities produced by the

ontologies they characterize. The antagonism of the agora is discounted, as are its covert

action and backroom deals. Much work to create and defend particular truths (about toxics,

for example) is carried out not in the open assemblies Latour counts on, but in corporate labs

and strategy rooms, which link too easily to regulatory science panels, which end up licensing

26

hazards The AIME project aspires to provide a middle ground for working through and with different ontologies, in the building of a common world. But the structure it has built for

this rules out so many kinds of entanglements that links to late industrialism are minimal at

best (Fortun, 2014, pp.320-321).

What is perhaps most incongruous about this Latourist program is the extent it goes out

of its way to indict everything that a normal person thinks constitutes politics in science,

consequently only to replace science critique with the most bland account of science that can be

found in contemporary culture. As is his wont, when not denouncing The Moderns, his

whipping boy is the sociologists:

[C]ritical sociology has too often substituted an invisible, unmovable and homogeneous world

of power for itself I reproach critical sociology for having confused society and the collective. Its mistake wasnt that it appeared political or confused science with politics, but it gave a definition of both science and politics that could only fail It does not require enormous skill or political acumen to realize that if you have to fight against a force that is

invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous and total, you will be powerless and roundly defeated To put it bluntly, if there is a society, then no politics is possible (Latour, 2005, p.250).

So, from Latours perspective, what sort of politics is possible? In his entire MOOC,

Latour conducts a discussion with precisely one natural scientist, the neuroscientist Andrew

Tobin. The only practical prescription to arise out of that interview is Latours praise for patient

organizations; namely, sufferers and their families who organize around a single issue disease

identity, in order to supposedly help guide medical research. The impression given of democratic

participation in the setting of the scientific agenda therein entirely ignores one of the most

important facts about contemporary patient organizations, namely, that most patient

organizations are either astroturfed or captured by Big Pharma, for the purpose of the promotion

of particular novel commercial therapies over older therapies.36

The patient lobbies are used to

achieve political goals of the drug companies that might be more difficult to attain if pursued

directly through normal regulatory channels. Hence, the track record of patient groups in guiding

and funding research is nowhere near as impressive as Latour makes out; and the upshot of

Latours position is to passively accept the status quo ante.

But more germane, given that Latour has given a number of talks on Gaia, the

Anthropocene and global warming (2013, 2014a,2014b), people may have gleaned a

misleading impression that he has enlisted on the side of the environmentalists and those who

36

See (Columbo et al, 2012; Rose, 2013).

27

want drastic political action to curb carbon emissions; but nothing could be further from the

truth. One must penetrate below the surface froth of these public talks to arrive at the actual

political implications growing out of all the palaver behind cosmograms, giving a voice to

carbon, a state of war with Gaia, and all the rest. There is a hint of it in one of the lecturesNo

wonder that climatoskeptics are denying the reliability of all those facts they now put in scare

quotes. In a way they are right (2014b, p.2) but the actual content is only spelled out in some

interviews, and in Latours actual political affiliations.

One of the most revealing is an interview from November 2014 with Verdeseo, a Chilean

think tank whose self-professed goal has been to think green politics away from the idealism of

those environmentalists enamoured with a rigid idea of nature. 37 Alongside the usual

denunciations of the Moderns, one finds the following admissions:

Activism is localized everywhere in very interesting issues, from slow food to carbon, and so

on. And everybody, so to speak, sort of absorbs from this activism. But the work, which still

should be done, is to say this is not an ecological crisis, it is a mutation. I think there is no way to get back to environmentalism, environmentalism is the past.So, what I did in Politics of Nature was to analyze the disconnect between massive and very important and interesting activism and the generally poor intellectual work done on what it is in the end to

absorb the end of nature, the end of naturalism Everybody is post-environmentalist, to use a term of the Breakthrough Institute (from which Im a member, even though I disagree with their position all the time). In practice everyone has become post-environmentalist.

As usual with Latour, we dont get anything more specific than that, but we can then

repair to the website of the Breakthrough Institute, where we find Latours face and name

prominently represented, to find out more about the content of this post-environmentalism.38

What we discover there is a think tank that has made its name by attacking environmentalists for

over a decade now: Breakthrough founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger made their

first big splash with an essay preaching the Death of Environmentalism back in 2004. The

infamous Roger Pilke Jr is one of their more prominent members. In 2010, the Breakthrough

Institute, along with the Brookings Institution and the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute,

published the report Post-Partisan Power, which called for increased federal investment in

innovation in order to make cheaper so-called clean energy. This nicely captured its default

37

All quotes in this paragraph from https://enverdeseo.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/bruno-latour-modernity-

is-politically-a-dangerous-goal/ . More information on Verdeseo can be found at: http://verdeseo.cl/verdeseo-in-

english/ . 38

See http://www.thebreakthrough.org/

28

rhetoric of somehow transcending Left and Right, in the usual myth of apolitical politics so

beloved by the patrons of such research. These days Breakthrough is known for propounding the

doctrine that governments really dont need to do much more about global warming than

encourage speedup of technological change, which is guaranteed to save us. The irony of

Latours comrades preaching the most vapid sort of technological determinism curdles when one

finds that the technologies that Breakthrough thinks holds the most promise are nuclear power,

fracking, and various geoengineering schemes such as carbon capture, while simultaneously

attacking programs to develop renewable energy sources like wind and solar.39

Although Latour

in his interview leaves room for plausible deniability, I think it especially noteworthy that the

very group he has chosen to ally with is precisely the one attacking the Left he so frequently

disparages, in the name of bland comfortable status quo.

Serendipitously for considerations of symmetry in this talk, I stumbled across a critique

of the Breakthrough Institute on the website of Larry Lessigs Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard,

which described the secret to Breakthroughs success as hippy-punching your way to fame and

fortune.40 The source explaining this felicitous phrase went on as follows:

Predictably, the attacks aimed at green groups drew outrage from their targets. Just as

predictably, the outrage was used as evidence that [Breakthrough] are brave truth-tellers,

renegades, the bad boys of environmentalism. I dont know if [Breakthrough] planned it that way, but the strategy turned out to be pure media gold.

If [Breakthrough] had come forward with nothing but a positive agenda for the future of clean

energy, they likely would have been politely ignored by the mainstream media just like

dozens of earnest green agenda-bearers before them. (Grists bookshelves sag under their weight.) But [Breakthrough] capitalized on an insight that had been ignored by their

forebears: nothing, but nothing, draws media interest like liberals bashing liberals. They enjoy

conservatives punching hippies. They dig centrists punching hippies. But they looove ex-

hippies punching hippies. A pair of greenies bravely exposing the corruption and dumbassery

of all the other greenies? Crack rock.

Its important to note that its not just Beltway reporters who love this stuff, though they love it the mostest. Ever since the perceived successes of Bill Clintons triangulation and the ascendency of the New Dems, the road to acceptance on the left has been paved with hippie

punching. To be legit, one must signal to ones peers that one is not like those liberals, the old-fashioned, soft-headed, bleeding-hearted, slogan-shouting kind. One is a Pragmatist, not a

Partisan, a traveler on the Third Way, not on the old, boring Left Way, a hard-headed,

practical sort, not some kind of dippy dreamer.

39

See, for instance, (Klein, 2014, p.57) 40

The Safra critique by Paul Thacker is at: http://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-

inconvenient-history-al-gore . It in turn cites the source of the following quote, David Roberts Why Ive avoided commenting on Nisbets Climate Shift report.

29

Here we begin to gain insight into Latours affiliation with Breakthrough, because

hippy-punching is a wonderful shorthand for Latours own approach to politics. Since Latour

finds the bulk of his audience amongst academic humanists, he often speaks in soothing tones as

if he shares much of their social and political orientationseven though he patently doesnt

believe in Humanity, Society, or as we have seen, their politics. For this reason, he comes across,

as Harman says, a politically elusive figure (2014, p.109). But then Latour proceeds to thrill

them by hippie-punching some phalanx of sociologists or science studies scholars for believing

in the boring old Left doctrinesmaybe disparaging environmentalism, or by insisting there is

no such thing as an economy (2004b, p.135), or suggesting the liberal State is opposed to the

liberated State, a state freed of all forms of naturalization (2004b, p.206), or intoning Even

though we have to continue fighting those who are in denial, I propose that we let them alone for

a moment (2014b, p.4) and proposes we should then insteaddo nothing! Those silly people

with their theories of Economy and Society are just masochistic losers:

[T]hose who call themselves the Left and even the radical Left are simultaneously sure of

failing and sure of being rightyes being right in the sense of conniving happily with the Right in letting capitalism be even more systematic than it is. Like science, politics opens

possibilities If you have failed, its not capitalism you should revolutionize but rather your ways of thinking. If you keep failing and dont change it does not mean you are facing an invincible monster, it means you like, you enjoy, you love to be defeated by a monster.

(2014c, p.9)

Here the two-faced character of the Latourist persona again surfaces. He is chiding the

science critics for being stupid and nave and defeatist: it is a war of all against all out there,

dont they get it? Provoked, they retort: But how about you, Monsieur Latour? Where do you

stand in the war? Incongruously, Latour then presents himself as situated somewhere above the

fray, basically indifferent as to whether it is even possible to triumph, to improve on the

situation, or falling into the trap of acting in a conventionally political manner. Latour hates

losers; and cannot imagine himself in a situation where he himself could be a loser. This

explains, I think, the one obvious common denominator throughout Latours career, the

insistence that inert things possess the same agency as humans. As Harman sagely observes,

Latour tends to call on nonhuman things for assistance whenever he seems to be most in danger

of advocating a free-for-all for human power struggles (2014, p.163). Is it starting to get a little

too obvious that he is just engaging in yet another round of hippy-punching? Has the war against

his peers engaging in science critique began to belie his jovial demeanor? Does his deference to

30

power border on the unseemly in someone who loudly denounces power? Then just call a halt,

bring those Things back on stage, and start extolling the Parliament of Things and Dingpolitik.

Send in the clones!

This, in turn, raises an interesting question: Is Latour really as self-contradictory as he

appears, or is there a deeper dynamic driving his popularity? It has occurred to more than one

person that many component parts of Latours politics resemble nothing better than a muddy

version of the dominant political ideology of our day, namely, neoliberalism. The resemblance

begins with Mrs. Thatcher, preaching that There is no such thing as Society, a common refrain

of Latour as well. The absence of a Nature/Society divide was characteristic of the later Hayek,

long before it became the catchphrase of Latour. Indeed, Hayeks doctrines of spontaneous

order and complexity are trademark enthusiasms of the Latourist canon. Harman points out

there is no macro level for Latour, just larger and smaller micro level (2014, p.119); this

hostility to the ontology of macro structures is equally canonical for the Austrian variant of

neoliberalism. Hayek was loudest in the neoliberal vanguard of those who argued that no human

being could possess sufficient knowledge to adequately plan and organize society; Harman

summarizes Latour as believing knowledge claims are a terrible basis for politics (2014,

p.119). Although Hayek derided something he called constructivism in his day, modern

commentators on neoliberalism have argued that constructivism is one of the best ways to

describe their cherished political doctrines.41

Hayeks hostility to intellectuals was legendary,

because he said they were all in the grip of a pernicious Weltanschauung; we have already

commented on Latours disparagement of the Moderns and their supposed mindset. Perhaps the

one thing which initially seems to set Latour apart from the neoliberals is his persistent habit of

denouncing the economists; however, some familiarity with the history of neoliberalism reveals

that the Mont Pelrin Society has been divided into two factionsone, the Chicago School,

which upheld neoclassical theory as the gospel of the neoliberal movement; and the other, the

Austrian variant, which rejected neoclassical economics as having any validity whatsoever. Both

have been reconciled with neoliberal practice.

As in the other cases we have unearthed in this paper, the strongest impression one gets

from reading Latour on capitalism is the sheer