Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of
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1. Now I know very well that Heidegger and Whitehead would have nothing to say to one another and yet the word the latter used in Process and Reality to describe actual occasions his word for my matters of concern is the word societies It is also by the way the word used by Gabriel Tarde the real founder of French sociology to describe all sorts of entities It is close enough to the word association that I have used all along to describe the objects of science and technology Andrew Pickering would use the words mangle of practice Whatever the words what is presented here is an entirely different attitude than the critical one not a flight into the condi tions of possibility of a given matter of fact not the addition of something 28 That matters of fact represent now a rather rare and complicated historical rendering of experience has been made powerfully clear by many writers see for telling segments of this history Christian Licoppe La Formation de la pratique scientifique Le Discours de exp rience en France et en Angleterre 1630 1820 Paris 1996 Mary Poovey A History of the Modern Fact Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society Chicago 1999 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150 1750 New York 1998 and Picturing Science Producing Art ed Caroline A Jones Galison and Amy Slaton New York 1998 29 See Andrew Pickering The Mangle of Practice2. They have entirely forgotten what it would require if we were to take this incredible sentence seriously For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature We may not pick up and choose For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon CN pp 28 29 All subsequent philosophies have done exactly the opposite they have picked and chosen and worse they have remained content with that lim ited choice The solution to this bifurcation is not as phenomenologists would have it adding to the boring electric waves the rich lived world of the glowing sun This would simply make the bifurcation greater The so lution or rather the adventure according to Whitehead is to dig much further into the realist attitude and to realize that matters of fact are totally implausible unrealistic unjustified definitions of what it is to deal with things 26 Alfred North Whitehead The Concept of Nature Cambridge 1920 p 29 hereafter abbreviated CN 27 See Isabelle Stengers Penser avec Whitehead Une Libre et sauvage cr ation de concepts Paris 2002 a book which has the great advantage of taking seriously Whitehead s science as well as his theory of God Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 Thus matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an indivi
3. or when he or she debunks the naive belief in freedom by showing the weight of determination FIGURE 4 One thing is clear not one of us readers would like to see our own most cherished objects treated in this way We would recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of having them socially explained whether we deal in poetry or robots stem cells blacks holes or impressionism whether we are patriots revolutionaries or lawyers whether we pray to God or put our hope in neuroscience This is why in my opinion those of us who tried to portray sciences as matters of concern so often failed to convince readers have con fused the treatment we give of the former matters of fact with the terrible fate of objects processed through the hands of sociology cultural studies and so on And I can t blame our readers What social scientists do to our favorite objects is so horrific that certainly we don t want them to come any nearer Please we exclaim don t touch them at all Don t try to explain them Or we might suggest more politely Why don t you go further down the corridor to this other department They have bad facts to account for why don t you explain away those ones instead of ours And this is the reason why when we want respect solidity obstinacy robustness we all prefer to stick to the language of matters of fact no matter its well known defects And yet this is not the only way because the cruel t
4. Matters of Concern Critical Gesture Move One that merely projects onto an indifferent matter your own power 7 EN __ You believe but in inthe power fact it is N ofanidol only the Ke J power of 3 7 your own sy ingenuity as to make you do things FIGURE 2 mination against idols they have mouths and speak not they have ears and hear not but they use this prophecy to decry the very objects of belief gods fashion poetry sport desire you name it to which naive believers cling with so much intensity And then the courageous critic who alone remains aware and attentive who never sleeps turns those false objects into fetishes that are supposed to be nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of society domination whatever The naive believer has received a first salvo fig 2 But wait a second salvo is in the offing and this time it comes from the fact pole This time it is the poor bloke again taken aback whose be havior is now explained by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact You ordinary fetishists believe you are free but in reality you are acted on by forces you are not conscious of Look at them look you blind idiot and here you insert whichever pet facts the social scientists fancy to work with taking them from economic infrastructure fields of discourse social domination race class and gender ma
5. Time Agency and Science Chicago 1995 245 246 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have missed but rather a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology philosophy metaphysics history sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thingto make it exist and to maintain its existence Objects are simply a gathering that has failed a fact that has not been assembled according to due process The stubbornness of matters of fact in the usual scenography of the rock kicking objector It is there whether you like it or not is much like the stubbornness of political demonstrators the U S love it or leave it that is a very poor substitute for any sort of vibrant articulate sturdy decent long term existence A gathering that is a thing an issue inside a Thing an arena can be very sturdy too on the condition that the number of its participants its ingredients nonhumans as well as humans not be limited in advance It is entirely wrong to divide the col lective as I call it into the sturdy matters of fact on the one hand and the dispensable crowds on the other Archimedes spoke for a whole tradition when he exclaimed Give me one fixed point and I will move the Earth but am I not speaking for another much less prestigious but maybe as re spectable tradition if I exclaim in turn Give me one mat
6. nagging doubts disturbing telltale signs What has be come of critique I wonder when an editorial in the New York Times con tains the following quote Most scientists believe that global warming is caused largely by man made pollutants that require strict regulation Mr Luntz a Republican strategist seems to acknowledge as much when he says that the scien tific debate is closing against us His advice however is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are set tled he writes their views about global warming will change accord ingly Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue Fancy that An artificially maintained scientific controversy to favor a brownlash as Paul and Anne Ehrlich would say 1 On what happened to the avant garde and critique generally see Iconoclash Beyond the Image Wars in Science Religion and Art ed Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel Cambridge Mass 2002 This article is very much an exploration of what could happen beyond the image wars 2 Environmental Word Games New York Times 15 Mar 2003 p A16 Luntz seems to have been very successful I read later in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal There is a better way than passing a law that restricts business which is to keep fighting on the merits There is no scientific consensus that greenhous
7. they too do things they too make you do things It is not only the objects of science that resist but all the others as well those that were sup posed to have been ground to dust by the powerful teeth of automated re flex action deconstructors To accuse something of being a fetish is the ultimate gratuitous disrespectful insane and barbarous gesture Is it not time for some progress To the fact position to the fairy position why not add a third position a fair position Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise at least once a century some new critical tools Should we not be thoroughly humiliated to see that mili tary personnel are more alert more vigilant more innovative than we the pride of academia the cr me de la cr me who go on ceaselessly transform ing the whole rest of the world into naive believers into fetishists into hap less 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 All the while being intimately certain that the things really close to our hearts would in no way fit any of those roles Are you not all tired of those explanations I am I have always been when I know for instance that the God to whom I pray the works of art I cherish the colon cancer I have been fighting the piece of law I am studying the desire I fe
8. twice shy Who would take a paper seriously that states some where after having spoken of Muslim women punishment of boys extra sensory perception In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping God s power of creating souls any more than we are in the procreation of children rather we are in either case instru ments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates CM p 443 Lots of gods always in machines Remember how Bush eulogized the crew of the Columbia for reaching home in heaven if not home on earth Here Turing too cannot avoid mentioning God s creative power when talk ing of this most mastered machine the computer that he has invented That s precisely his point The computer is in for many surprises you get out of it much more than you put into it In the most dramatic way Turing s paper demonstrates once again that all objects are born things all matters of fact require in order to exist a bewildering variety of matters of con cern The surprising result is that we don t master what we ourselves have fabricated the object of this definition of critique entirely mistaken in the direction of the move he proposes back to the future to go back to the natural attitude is a sign of nostalgia 35 See A M Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence Mind 59 Oct 1950 433 60 hereafter abbreviated CM See also wha
9. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away If however the size of the pile is sufficiently in creased the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds and is there one for ma chines There does seem to be one for the human mind The majority of them seem to be sub critical i e to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub critical size An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply A smallish proportion are super critical An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole the ory consisting of secondary tertiary and more remote ideas Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub critical Adhering to this analogy we ask Can a machine be made to be super critical CM p 454 We all know subcritical minds that s for sure What would critique do if it could be associated with more not with less with multiplication not subtraction Critical theory died away long ago can we become critical again in the sense here offered by Turing That is generating more ideas than we have received inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away or dropping into quiescence like a piano no longer struck This would require that all entities including computers cease to be object
10. a beautifully mas tered object as the shuttle disintegrated into thousands of pieces of debris raining down from the sky but the omen was not heeded gods nowadays are invoked for convenience only My point is thus very simple things have become Things again objects have reentered the arena the Thing in which they have to be gathered first in order to exist later as what stands apart The parenthesis that we can call the modern parenthesis during which we had on the one hand a world of objects Gegenstand out there unconcerned by any sort of parliament fo rum agora congress court and on the other a whole set of forums meet ing places town halls where people debated has come to a close What the etymology of the word thing chose causa res aitia had conserved for us mysteriously as a sort of fabulous and mythical past has now become for all to see our most ordinary present Things are gathered again Was it not extraordinarily moving to see for instance in the lower Manhattan recon struction project the long crowds the angry messages the passionate emails the huge agoras the long editorials that connected so many people to so many variations of the project to replace the Twin Towers As the architect Daniel Libeskind said a few days before the decision building will never be the same I could open the newspaper and unfold the number of former objects that have become things again from the global warming case I me
11. about a dozen books to inspire respect for some people have said to uncritically glorify the objects of science and technology of art religion and more recently law showing every time in great detail the complete implausibility of their being socially explained and yet the only noise readers hear is the snapping of the wolf s teeth Is it really impossible to solve the question to write not matter of factually but how should I say it in a matter of concern way Martin Heidegger as every philosopher knows has meditated many times on the ancient etymology of the word thing We are now all aware that in all the European languages including Russian there is a strong connec 10 This is the achievement of the great novelist Richard Powers whose stories are a careful and in my view masterful enquiry into this new realism Especially relevant for this paper is Richard Powers Plowing the Dark New York 2000 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 tion between the words for thing and a quasi judiciary assembly Icelanders boast of having the oldest Parliament which they call Althing and you can still visit in many Scandinavian countries assembly places that are desig nated by the word Ding or Thing Now is this not extraordinary that the banal term we use for designating what is out there unquestionably a thing what lies out of any dispute out of language is also the oldest word we all have used to designate the oldest of
12. and premodern namely the sudden and somewhat miraculous appearance of matters of fact is now thrown into doubt with the merging of matters of fact into highly complex historically situated richly diverse matters of concern You can do one sort of thing with mugs jugs rocks swans cats mats but not with Einstein s Patent Bureau electric coordination of clocks in Bern Things that gather cannot be thrown at you like objects And yet I know full well that this is not enough because no matter what we do when we try to reconnect scientific objects with their aura their crown their web of associations when we accompany them back to their gathering we always appear to weaken them not to strengthen their claim to reality I know I know we are acting with the best intentions in the world we want to add reality to scientific objects but inevitably through a sort of tragic bias we seem always to be subtracting some bit from it Like a clumsy waiter setting plates on a slanted table every nice dish slides down and crashes on the ground Why can we never discover the same stubborn ness the same solid realism by bringing out the obviously webby thingy qualities of matters of concern Why can t we ever counteract the claim of realists that only a fare of matters of fact can satisfy their appetite and that matters of concern are much like nouvelle cuisine nice to look at but not fit for voracious appetites One reason is of cou
13. com plaining so much about the gullible masses swallowing naturalized facts it would be really unfair to now discredit the same masses for their what should I call it gullible criticism Or could this be a case of radicalism gone mad as when a revolution swallows its progeny Or rather have we behaved 8 Their serious as well as their popularized versions have the defect of using society as an already existing cause instead of as a possible consequence This was the critique that Gabriel Tarde always made against Durkheim It is probably the whole notion of social and society that is responsible for the weakening of critique I have tried to show that in Latour Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social in The Social in Question New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences ed Patrick Joyce London 2002 pp 117 32 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 like mad scientists who have let the virus of critique out of the confines of their laboratories and cannot do anything now to limit its deleterious ef fects it mutates now gnawing everything up even the vessels in which it is contained Or is it an another case of the famed power of capitalism for recycling everything aimed at its destruction As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello say the new spirit of capitalism has put to good use the artistic critique that was supposed to destroy it If the dense and moralist cigar smoking reactionary bourgeois can transform him or herself into a
14. free floating agnostic bohemian moving opinions capital and networks from one end of the planet to the other without attachment why would he or she not be able to absorb the most sophisticated tools of deconstruction social construction discourse analysis postmodernism postology In spite of my tone I am not trying to reverse course to become reac tionary to regret what I have done to swear that I will never be a construc tivist any more I simply want to do what every good military officer at regular periods would do retest the linkages between the new threats he or she has to face and the equipment and training he or she should have in order to meet them and if necessary to revise from scratch the whole paraphernalia This does not mean for us any more than it does for the officer that we were wrong but simply that history changes quickly and that there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one Whatever the case our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and worst of all to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them not fighting empiricism bu
15. in dustry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia Didn t I read that some where in Michel Foucault Has knowledge slash power been co opted of late by the National Security Agency Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr Ridge fig 1 Let me be mean for a second What s the real difference between con spiracists and a popularized that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading of let s say a sociologist as eminent as Pierre 5 See Jean Baudrillard The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers New York 2002 6 See Thierry Meyssan 911 The Big Lie London 2002 Conspiracy theories have always existed what is new in instant revisionism is how much scientific proof they claim to imitate 7 See Lindsay Waters Enemy of Promises forthcoming see also Nick Paumgarten Dept of Super Slo Mo No Flag on the Play The New Yorker 20 Jan 2003 p 32 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 FIGURE 1 Bourdieu to be polite I will stick with the French field commanders In both cases you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls ofa complete illusio of their real motives Then after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested fo
16. in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the ap pearance of objective statements do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices And yet entire Ph D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up that there is no such thing as natural unmediated unbiased access to truth that we are always prisoners of language that we always speak from a particular standpoint and so on while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard won evidence that could save our lives Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not Why can t I simply say that 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 Should we apologize for having been wrong all along Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself an
17. Heidegger says how striking to see how it can sud denly disband If the thinging of the thing is a gathering that always con nects the united four earth and sky divinities and mortals in the simple onefold of their self unified fourfold how could there be a better example of this making and unmaking than this catastrophe unfolding all its thou sands of folds How could we see it as a normal accident of technology when in his eulogy for the unfortunate victims your president said The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth yet we can pray that all are safely home As if no shuttle ever moved simply in space but also always in heaven This was on C Span 1 but on C Span 2 at the very same time early February 2003 another extraordinary parallel event was occurring This time a Thing with a capital T was assembled to try to coalesce to gather in one decision one object one projection of force a military strike against Iraq Again it was hard to tell whether this gathering was a tribunal a par liament a command and control war room a rich man s club a scientific congress or a TV stage But certainly it was an assembly where matters of great concern were debated and proven except there was much puzzle ment about which type of proofs should be given and how accurate they were The difference between C Span 1 and C Span 2 as I watched them with bewilderment was that while in the ca
18. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern Bruno Latour Wars So many wars Wars outside and wars inside Cultural wars science wars and wars against terrorism Wars against poverty and wars against the poor Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance My question is simple Should we be at war too we the scholars the intellectuals Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction More iconoclasm to iconoclasm What has become of the critical spirit Has it run out of steam Quite simply my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines their contingency plans the size direction and technology of their projectiles their smart bombs their mis siles I wonder why we we alone would be saved from those sorts of revi sions It does not seem to me that we have been as quick in academia to prepare ourselves for new threats new dangers new tasks new targets Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids yes young recruits young cadets for wars that are no longer possible fighting enemies long gone conquering territories that no longer
19. c This exhibition will explore what Iconoclash had simply pointed at namely beyond the image wars 33 This paper is a companion of another one Latour The Promises of Constructivism in Chasing Technoscience Matrix for Materiality ed Don Ihde and Evan Selinger Bloomington Ind 2003 pp 27 46 34 This is why although I share all of the worries of Thomas de Zengotita Common Ground Finding Our Way Back to the Enlightenment Harper s 306 Jan 2003 35 45 I think he is Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 The practical problem we face if we try to go that new route is to as sociate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors ges tures attitudes knee jerk reactions habits of thoughts To begin with this new habit forming ld like to extract another definition of critique from the most unlikely source namely Allan Turing s original paper on thinking machines I have a good reason for that here is the typical paper about formalism here is the origin of one of the icons to use a clich of anti fetishism of the contemporary age namely the computer and yet if you read this paper it is so baroque so kitsch it assembles such an astounding number of metaphors beings hypotheses allusions that there is no chance that it would be accepted nowadays by any journal Even Social Text would reject it out of hand as another hoax Not again they would certainly say once bitten
20. changed so much that we might still be directing all our arsenal east or west while the enemy has now moved to a very different place After all masses of atomic missiles are transformed into a huge pile of junk once the question becomes how to defend against militants armed with box cutters or dirty bombs Why would it not be the same with our critical arsenal with the neutron bombs of de construction with the missiles of discourse analysis Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have I have always fancied that what took great effort occupied huge rooms cost a lot of sweat and money for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin can be had for nothing much like the supercomputers of the 1950s which used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail As the recent advertisement of a Hol lywood film proclaimed Everything is suspect Everyone is for sale And nothing is what it seems What s happening to me you may wonder Is this a case of midlife crisis No alas I passed middle age quite a long time ago Is this a patrician spite for the popularization of critique As if critique should be reserved for the elite and remain difficult and strenuous like mountain climbing or yacht ing and is no longer worth the trouble if everyone can do it for a nickel What would be so bad with critique for the people We have been
21. d with routine or boring objects I was reading his passage on the Challenger disaster in his book Statues when another shuttle Columbia in early 2003 offered me a tragic instantiation of yet another metamorphosis of an object into a thing 6 What else would you call this sudden transformation of a completely mastered perfectly understood quite forgotten by the media taken for granted matter of factual projectile into a sudden shower of debris falling 14 Although Fleck is the founder of science studies the impact of his work is still very much in the future because he has been so deeply misunderstood by Thomas Kuhn see Thomas Kuhn foreword to Ludwik Fleck Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact 1935 Chicago 1979 pp vii xi 15 See Ian Hacking The Social Construction of What Cambridge Mass 1999 in particular the last chapter 16 See Michel Serres Statues Le Second Livre des fondations Paris 1987 On the reason why Serres was never critical see Serres with Latour Conversations on Science Culture and Time trans Roxanne Lapidus Ann Arbor Mich 1995 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 on the United States which thousands of people tried to salvage in the mud and rain and collect in a huge hall to serve as so many clues in a judicial scientific investigation Here suddenly in a stroke an object had become a thing a matter of fact was considered as a matter of great concern If a thing is a gathering as
22. d 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 Nothing guarantees after all that we should be right all the time There is no sure ground even for criticism Isn t this what criticism intended to say that there is no sure ground anywhere But what does it mean when this lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish Artificially maintained controversies are not the only worrying sign 4 The metaphor of shifting sand was used by neomodernists in their critique of science studies see A House Built on Sand Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science ed Noretta Koertge Oxford 1998 The problem is that the authors of this book looked backward attempting to reenter the solid rock castle of modernism and not forward to what I call for lack of a better term nonmodernism 227 228 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern What has critique become when a French general no a marshal of critique namely Jean Baudrillard claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight so to speak undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of noth ingness gt What has become of critique when a book that claims that no
23. debates between realism and relativism never go anywhere As Ian Hacking has recently shown the en gagement of a rock in philosophical talk is utterly different if you take a banal rock to make your point usually to lapidate a passing relativist or if you take for instance dolomite as he has done so beautifully The first can be turned into a matter of fact but not the second Dolomite is so beau tifully complex and entangled that it resists being treated as a matter of fact It too can be described as a gathering it too can be seen as engaging the fourfold Why not try to portray it with the same enthusiasm engagement and complexity as the Heideggerian jug Heidegger s mistake is not to have treated the jug too well but to have traced a dichotomy between Gegenstand and Thing that was justified by nothing except the crassest of prejudices Several years ago another philosopher much closer to the history of sci ence namely Michel Serres also French but this time as foreign to critique as one can get meditated on what it would mean to take objects of science in a serious anthropological and ontological fashion It is interesting to note that every time a philosopher gets closer to an object of science that is at once historical and interesting his or her philosophy changes and the spec ifications for a realist attitude become at once more stringent and com pletely different from the so called realist philosophy of science concerne
24. dual entity It is this refusal which has caused the muddle of importing the mere pro cedure of thought into the fact of nature The entity bared of all charac teristics except those of space and time has acquired a physical status as the ultimate texture of nature so that the course of nature is conceived as being merely the fortunes of matter in its adventure through space CN p 20 It is not the case that there would exist solid matters of fact and that the next step would be for us to decide whether they will be used to explain something It is not the case either that the other solution is to attack criti cize expose historicize those matters of fact to show that they are made up interpreted flexible It is not the case that we should rather flee out of them into the mind or add to them symbolic or cultural dimensions the question is that matters of fact are a poor proxy of experience and of ex perimentation and I would add a confusing bundle of polemics of epis temology of modernist politics that can in no way claim to represent what is requested by a realist attitude Whitehead is not an author known for keeping the reader wide awake but I want to indicate at least the direction of the new critical attitude with which I wish to replace the tired routines of most social theories The solution lies it seems to me in this promising word gathering that Heidegger had introduced to account for the thingness of the thing
25. e gases cause the world s modest global warming trend much less whether that warming will do more harm than good or whether we can even do anything about it Once Republicans concede that greenhouse gases must be controlled it will only be a matter of time before they end up endorsing more economically damaging regulation They could always stand on principle and attempt to educate the public instead A Republican Kyoto Wall Street Journal 8 Apr 2003 p A14 And the same publication complains about the pathological relation of the Arab street with truth 3 Paul R and Anne H Ehrlich Betrayal of Science and Reason How Anti Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future Washington D C 1997 p 1 Bruno LATOUR teaches sociology at the Ecole des Mines in Paris Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 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 argument or did I After all I have been accused of just that sin Still I d like to believe that on the contrary I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts Was I foolishly mistaken Have things changed so fast In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence
26. el indeed the very book I am writing could in no way be accounted for by fetish or fact nor by any combination of those two absurd positions To retrieve a realist attitude it is not enough to dismantle critical weap ons so uncritically built up by our predecessors as we would obsolete but still dangerous atomic silos If we had to dismantle social theory only it would be a rather simple affair like the Soviet empire those big totalities have feet of clay But the difficulty lies in the fact that they are built on top of a much older philosophy so that whenever we try to replace matters of fact by matters of concern we seem to lose something along the way It is like trying to fill the mythical Danaid s barrel no matter what we put in it the level of realism never increases As long as we have not sealed the leaks the realist attitude will always be split matters of fact take the best part and matters of concern are limited to a rich but essentially void or irrelevant history More will always seem less Although I wish to keep this paper short I need to take a few more pages to deal with ways to overcome this bifurcation Alfred North Whitehead famously said The recourse to metaphysics is 25 The exhibition in Karlsruhe Germany Iconoclash was a sort of belated ritual in order to atone for so much wanton destruction 243 244 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern like throwing a match into a powder maga
27. exist leaving them ill equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated for which we are so thoroughly unprepared Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late especially French generals especially these days Would it be so surprising For Graham Harman This text was written for the Stanford presidential lecture held at the humanities center 7 Apr 2003 I warmly thank Harvard history of science doctoral students for many ideas exchanged on those topics during this semester Critical Inquiry 30 Winter 2004 2004 by The University of Chicago 0093 1896 04 3002 0020 10 00 All rights reserved 225 226 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern after all if intellectuals were also one war late one critique late especially French intellectuals especially now It has been a long time after all since intellectuals were in the vanguard Indeed it has been a long time since the very notion of the avant garde the proletariat the artistic passed away pushed aside by other forces moved to the rear guard or maybe lumped with the baggage train We are still able to go through the motions of a critical avant garde but is not the spirit gone In these most depressing of times these are some of the issues I want to press not to depress the reader but to press ahead to redirect our meager capacities as fast as possible To prove my point I have not exactly facts but rather tiny cues
28. ggression by invoking the genetic makeup of violent people but try to do that while dragging in at the same time the many controversies in genetics including evolutionary theories in which geneticists find themselves so thoroughly embroiled On both accounts matters of concern never occupy the two positions left for them by critical barbarity Objects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak to be treated as indisputable causal expla nations of some unconscious action And this is not true of scientific states of affairs only this is our great discovery what made science studies commit such a felicitous mistake such a felix culpa Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained then you realize too that the so called weak objects those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of an tifetishism were never mere projections on an empty screen either They 23 For a striking example see Jean Jacques Kupiec and Pierre Sonigo Ni Dieu ni g ne Pour une autre th orie de h r dit Paris 2000 see also Evelyn Fox Keller The Century of the Gene Cambridge Mass 2000 24 Ihave attempted to use this argument recently on two most difficult types of entities Christian divinities Latour Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse Paris 2002 and law Latour La Fabrique du droit Une Ethnographie du Conseil d tat Paris 2002 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 too act
29. n popular culture art politics and so on 2 an unrepentant positivist for all the sci ences you believe in sociology economics conspiracy theory genetics evolutionary psychology semiotics just pick your preferred field of study and 3 a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish and of course it might be criticism itself but also painting bird watching Shakespeare baboons proteins and so on If you think I am exaggerating in my somewhat dismal portrayal of the critical landscape it is because we have had in effect almost no occasion so far to detect the total mismatch of the three contradictory repertoires antifetishism positivism realism because we carefully manage to apply them on different topics We explain the objects we don t approve of by treating them as fetishes we account for behaviors we don t like by disci pline whose makeup we don t examine and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us in science studies who have to deal with states 241 242 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern of affairs that fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes because everyone including us does believe very strongly in them nor in the list of undis putable facts because we are witnessing their birth thei
30. nment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful de scriptive tool that of matters of fact which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs powers and illusions it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact in turn were eaten up by the same debunking impetus After that the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses My question is thus Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care as Donna Haraway would put it Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality To put it another way what s the difference between deconstruction and constructivism So far you could object the prospect doesn t look very good and you Monsieur Latour seem the person the least able to deliver on this promise because you spent your life debunking what the other more polite critics had at least respected until then namely matters of fact and science itself You can dust your hands with flour as much as you wish the black fur of the critical wolf will always betray you your deconstructing teeth have been sharpened on too many of our innocent labs I mean lambs for us to believe you Well see that s just the problem I have written
31. ntioned earlier to the hormonal treatment of menopause to the work of Tim Lenoir the primate studies of Linda Fedigan and Shirley Strum or the hyenas of my friend Steven Glickman Nor are those gatherings limited to the present period as if only recently objects had become so obviously things Every day historians of science help us realize to what extent we have never been modern because they keep revising every single element of past matters of fact from Mario Biagioli s Galileo Steven Shapin s Boyle and Simon Schaffer s Newton to the in credibly intricate linkages between Einstein and Poincar that Peter Galison has narrated in his latest masterpiece Many others of course could be cited but the crucial point for me now is that what allowed historians phi 19 Serres proposed the word quasi object to cover this intermediary phase between things and objects a philosophical question much more interesting than the tired old one of the relation between words and worlds On the new way animals appear to scientists and the debate it triggers see Primate Encounters Models of Science Gender and Society ed Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan Chicago 2000 and Vinciane Despret Quand le loup habitera avec l agneau Paris 2002 20 See Peter Galison Einstein s Clocks Poincar s Maps Empires of Time New York 2003 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 losophers humanists and critics to trace the difference between modern
32. plane ever crashed into the Pentagon can be a bestseller I am ashamed to say that the author was French too Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived very late after the facts had been thoroughly estab lished decades after bodies of evidence had accumulated Now we have the benefit of what can be called instant revisionism The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account adding even more ruins to the ruins adding even more smoke to the smoke What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naive because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naively believed in church motherhood and apple pie Things have changed a lot at least in my village I am now the one who naively believes in some facts because I am educated while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible Where have you been Don t you know that the Mossad and the CIA did it What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish the enemy of promises as Lindsay Waters calls him believes he defends science studies my field by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball What has become of critique when there is a whole
33. r slow construction their fascinating emergence as matters of concern The metaphor of the Copernican revolution so tied to the destiny of critique has always been for us science students simply moot This is why with more than a good dose of field chauvinism I consider this tiny field so important it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbar ians more and more painful The mistake would be to believe that we too have given a social expla nation of scientific facts No even though it is true that at first we tried like good critics trained in the good schools to use the armaments handed to us by our betters and elders to crack open one of their favorite expres sions meaning to destroy religion power discourse hegemony But for tunately yes fortunately one after the other we witnessed that the black boxes of science remained closed and that it was rather the tools that lay in the dust of our workshop disjointed and broken Put simply critique was useless against objects of some solidity You can try the projective game on UFOs or exotic divinities but don t try it on neurotransmitters on gravi tation on Monte Carlo calculations But critique is also useless when it be gins to use the results of one science uncritically be it sociology itself or economics or postimperialism to account for the behavior of people You can try to play this miserable game of explaining a
34. r what is really going on in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently continu ously relentlessly Of course we in the academy like to use more elevated causes society discourse knowledge slash power fields of forces em pires capitalism while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation in the first movement of disbelief and then in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below What if explanations resorting automatically to power society dis course had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now 229 230 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern feeding the most gullible sort of critique Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously but it worries me to detect in those mad mixtures of knee jerk disbelief punctilious demands for proofs and free use of pow erful explanation from the social neverland many of the weapons of social critique Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments but like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party these are our weapons nonetheless In spite of all the defor mations it is easy to recognize still burnt in the steel our trademark Made in Criticalland Do you see why I am worried Threats might have
35. reatment objects un dergo in the hands of what Id like to call critical barbarity is rather easy to undo If the critical barbarian appears so powerful it is because the two mechanisms I have just sketched are never put together in one single dia gram fig 5 Antifetishists debunk objects they don t believe in by showing the productive and projective forces of people then without ever making Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 The Critical Trick Two Objects Two Subjects The subject is either The object is so powerful that he or either nothing but she can create everything out of his her own labor a screen on which to project human free will or nothing but a mere receptacle for the forces of determines what determinations humans think known by natural and and do social sciences or so powerful that it causally FIGURE 5 the connection they use objects they do believe in to resort to the causalist or mechanist explanation and debunk conscious capacities of people whose behavior they don t approve of The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on although we would never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop is that there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position This is why you can be at once and without even sensing any contradiction 1 an antifetishist for everything you don t believe in for the most part religio
36. rse the position objects have been given in most social sciences a position that is so ridiculously useless that ifit is employed even in a small way for dealing with science technology religion law or literature it will make absolutely impossible any serious consideration of objectivity I mean of thinginess Why is this so Let me try to portray the critical landscape in its ordinary and routine state We can summarize I estimate 90 percent of the contemporary critical scene by the following series of diagrams that fixate the object at only two positions what I have called the fact position and the fairy position fact and fairy are etymologically related but I won t develop this point here The fairy position is very well known and is used over and over again by many social scientists who associate criticism with antifetishism The role of the critic is then to show that what the naive believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself Here they have diverted to their petty use the prophetic ful 21 I summarize here some of the results of my already long anthropological inquiry into the iconoclastic gesture from Latour We Have Never Been Modern trans Catherine Porter Cambridge Mass 1993 to Pandora s Hope Essays on the Reality of Science Studies Cambridge Mass 1999 and of course Iconoclash 237 238 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact
37. s defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things mediating assembling gathering many more folds than the united four If this were possible then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern we cherish and then at last we could tell them Yes please touch them explain them deploy them Then we would have gone for good beyond iconoclasm am often wrong and the result is a surprise for me for by the time the experiment is done these assumptions have been forgotten These admissions lay me open to lectures on the subject of my vicious ways but do not throw any doubt on my credibility when I testify to the surprises I experience CM pp 450 51 On this nonformalist definition of computers see Brian Cantwell Smith On the Origin of Objects Cambridge Mass 1997
38. s well known anyway What is certain is that those pathmarks off the beaten track led indeed nowhere And yet Heidegger when he takes the jug se riously offers a powerful vocabulary to talk also about the object he despises so much What would happen I wonder if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology the Gegenstand as if it had the rich and com plicated qualities of the celebrated Thing The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they 11 See the erudite study by the remarkable French scholar of Roman law Yan Thomas Res chose et patrimoine note sur le rapport sujet objet en droit romain Archives de philosophie du droit 25 1980 413 26 12 See Graham Harman Tool Being Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects Chicago 2002 13 Martin Heidegger What Is a Thing trans W B Barton Jr and Vera Deutsch Chicago 1967 p 95 233 234 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots mugs and jugs to which sometimes they might add the occa sional rock But as Ludwik Fleck remarked long ago their objects are never complicated enough more precisely they are never simultaneously made through a complex history and new real and interesting participants in the universe Philosophy never deals with the sort of beings we in science studies have dealt with And that s why the
39. se of Columbia we hada perfectly mastered object that suddenly was transformed into a shower of burning debris that was used as so much evidence in an investigation there at the United Nations we had an investigation that tried to coalesce in one uni fying unanimous solid mastered object masses of people opinions and might In one case the object was metamorphosed into a thing in the sec ond the thing was attempting to turn into an object We could witness in one case the head in another the tail of the trajectory through which mat ters of fact emerge out of matters of concern In both cases we were offered a unique window into the number of things that have to participate in the gathering of an object Heidegger was not a very good anthropologist of science and technology he had only four folds while the smallest shuttle the shortest war has millions How many gods passions controls insti 17 Heidegger The Thing Poetry Language Thought trans Albert Hofstadter New York 1971 p 178 18 Bush Talking More about Religion Faith to Solve the Nation s Problems CNN website 18 Feb 2003 www cnn com 2003 ALLPOLITICS 02 18 bush faith 235 236 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern tutions techniques diplomacies wits have to be folded to connect earth and sky divinities and mortals oh yes especially mortals Frightening omen to launch such a complicated war just when such
40. t on the con trary renewing empiricism What I am going to argue is that the critical mind if it is to renew itself and be relevant again is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude to speak like William James but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern not matters of fact The mistake we made the mistake I made was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one s at tention toward the conditions that made them possible But this meant ac cepting much too uncritically what matters of fact were This was remaining too faithful to the unfortunate solution inherited from the philosophy of 9 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme Paris 1999 231 232 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern Immanuel Kant Critique has not been critical enough in spite ofall its sore scratching Reality is not defined by matters of fact Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience Matters of fact are only very partial and I would argue very polemical very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs It is this second empiricism this return to the realist attitude that I d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded To indicate the direction of the argument I want to show that while the Enlighte
41. t Powers in Galatea 2 2 New York 1995 did with this paper this is critique in the most generous sense of the word For the context of this paper see Andrew Hodges Alan Turing The Enigma New York 1983 36 A nonformalist definition of formalism has been proposed by Brian Rotman Ad Infinitum The Ghost in Turing s Machine Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In Stanford Calif 1993 37 Since Turing can be taken as the first and best programmer those who believe in defining machines by inputs and outputs should meditate his confession Machines take me by surprise with great frequency This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do or rather because although I doa calculation I do it in a hurried slipshod fashion taking risks Perhaps I say to myself I suppose the voltage here ought to be the same as there anyway let s assume it is Naturally I 247 248 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace s objection which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do One could say that a man can inject an idea into the machine and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence like a piano string struck by a hammer Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than criti cal size an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without
42. ter of concern and I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to be gathered to hold it firmly in place For me it makes no sense to reserve the realist vocabulary for the first one only The critic is not the one who debunks but the one who assembles The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly be tween antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya but the one for whom if something is constructed then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique not away but toward the gathering the Thing Not westward but so to speak eastward 4 30 See Latour Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy trans Porter Cambridge Mass 2004 31 See the marvelously funny rendering of the realist gesture in Malcolm Ashmore Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter The Bottom Line The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations Configurations 2 Winter 1994 1 14 32 This is the challenge of a new exhibition I am curating with Peter Weibel in Karlsruhe and that is supposed to take place in 2004 under the provisional title Making Things Publi
43. the sites in which our ancestors did their dealing and tried to settle their disputes A thing is in one sense an object out there and in another sense an issue very much in there at any rate a gathering To use the term I introduced earlier now more precisely the same word thing designates matters of fact and matters of concern Needless to say although he develops this etymology at length this is not the path that Heidegger has taken On the contrary all his writing aims to make as sharp a distinction as possible between on the one hand objects Gegenstand and on the other the celebrated Thing The handmade jug can bea thing while the industrially made can of Coke remains an object While the latter is abandoned to the empty mastery of science and technology only the former cradled in the respectful idiom of art craftsmanship and poetry could deploy and gather its rich set of connections This bifurca tion is marked many times but in a decisive way in his book on Kant Up to this hour such questions have been open Their questionability is concealed by the results and the progress of scientific work One of these burning questions concerns the justification and limits of mathe matical formalism in contrast to the demand for an immediate return to intuitively given nature What has happened to those who like Heidegger have tried to find their ways in immediacy in intuition in nature would be too sad to retell and i
44. wn projective capacity you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again this time by showing that whatever they think their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don t see but that you yes you the never sleeping critic alone can see Isn t this fabulous Isn t it really worth going to gradu ate school to study critique Enter here you poor folks After arduous years of reading turgid prose you will be always right you will never be taken in any more no one no matter how powerful will be able to accuse you of naivet that supreme sin any longer Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule alone striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the solid causality of objectivity in the other The only loser is the naive believer the great unwashed always caught off balance fig 4 Is it so surprising after all that with such positions given to the object the humanities have lost the hearts of their fellow citizens that they had to retreat year after year entrenching themselves always further in the narrow barracks left to them by more and more stingy deans The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely to be sure but over a desert 239 240 Bruno Latour Matters of Fact Matters of Concern a but the critic is debunks the claims of 1 the fetishist by showing always right the work of his or her hands
45. ybe throwing in some neurobiology evolutionary psychology whatever provided they act as indisputable facts whose origin fabrication mode of development are left unexamined fig 3 Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind Why critique 22 See William Pietz The Problem of the Fetish I Res 9 Spring 1985 5 17 The Problem of the Fetish II The Origin of the Fetish Res 13 Spring 1987 23 45 and The Problem of the Fetish Ila Bosman s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism Res 16 Autumn 1988 105 23 Critical Inquiry Winter 2004 Critical Gesture Move Two to make you do things out of an You indifferent matter believe in a E N the free 7 gt __ but in fact power of tae you are your own unwillingly will amp activated to do things ey p N y by the necessary power of genes interests drives etc FIGURE 3 this most ambiguous pharmakon has become such a potent euphoric drug You are always right When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods their poetry their cherished objects you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection that you yes you alone can see But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance in their o
46. zine It blows up the whole arena I cannot avoid getting into it because I have talked so much about weapon systems explosions iconoclasm and arenas Ofall the modern phi losophers who tried to overcome matters of fact Whitehead is the only one who instead of taking the path of critique and directing his attention away from facts to what makes them possible as Kant did or adding something to their bare bones as Husserl did or avoiding the fate of their domination their Gestell as much as possible as Heidegger did tried to get closerto them or more exactly to see through them the reality that requested a new re spectful realist attitude No one is less a critic than Whitehead in all the meanings of the word and it s amusing to notice that the only pique he ever directed against someone else was against the other W the one considered wrongly in my view as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century not W as in Bush but W as in Wittgenstein What set Whitehead completely apart and straight on our path is that he considered matters of fact to be a very poor rendering of what is given in experience and something that muddles entirely the question What is there with the question How do we know it as Isabelle Stengers has shown recently in a major book about Whitehead s philosophy Those who now mock his philosophy don t understand that they have resigned themselves to what he called the bifurcation of nature
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