Knowledge and the Political: Bruno Latour's Political Epistemology

Abstract

Why bring Bruno Latour into a conversation about "Classical Reception and the Political"? Latour's name is most closely connected with science studies, particularly the "ethnographical" study Laboratory Life he published with Steve Woolgar, and Science in Action, in which he developed the "actor-network theory" that is now so closely associated with his work. Science, he argues, is not to be understood in the abstract (capital S), but as a diverse set of practices that depends for its success on the development, and maintenance, of complex networks of forces. Thus, it is not sufWcient to explain the success of Pasteur's germ theory in terms of its being "true" rather than "false" (an ex post facto theorization; see Kennedy 2002, 26-27). It did not spring fully armed from Pasteur's brain, to be embraced spontaneously by a grateful public.