SF-TH Inc

Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects

Author(s): Roger Luckhurst
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp.
4-17
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241405
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SCIENCE FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

Roger Luckhurst
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and
Tangled Objects
BrunoLatour,professor at the Ecole NationaleSuperieuredes Mines de Paris,
has been a controversialfigure in science andtechnologystudiesfor twenty-five
years. His work has hovered on the edges of critical theory in the humanities,
buthas never quitebeen subsumedinto thatgeneric French "theory"thatAngloAmericanacademiestend to construct. Instead,he has helped refashionSTS in
FranceandAmerica, andthe influenceof his Science in Action (1987) madehim
an importantfigure in the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular
methodology, "Actor-NetworkTheory" (ANT), has been extractedfrom this
early work, althoughLatourhimself has until recentlybeen reluctantto use these
terms. Since his attackon the philosophicalpremises of (scientific) modernity
in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour's work has developed wider
ambitions. He has articulatedhis project as aiming "to visit successively and to
document the different truth production sites that make up our civilisation"
(Crease 18). Having focused on the construction of truth in science and
technology and on the sociology of science, he has recently moved rapidly
throughphilosophy, law, religion, art (co-curatingthe exhibitionIconoclash in
2002), and academic critique.1 This is a reflection of his multi-disciplinary
training-he has always combinedparticipant-observation
anthropologywith the
sociology and philosophy of science, blending empirical case studies with
contentiousreformulationsof method.
But this mix is also a mark of his desire to shake up the fixed grids of
disciplines formed in the university by a "modernsettlement"in which he no
longer believes. Instead, Latour pursues new and surprisingassemblages of
knowledge, in part because he insists that the world is not safely divided
between society and science, politics and nature, subjects and objects, social
constructions and reality, but rather is populated increasingly by strange
hybrids-what he variously calls "risky attachments"or "tangled objects"
(Politics 22)-that cut across these divides and demandnew ways of thinking.
A witty and elegant stylist, Latourhas proposed that "the hybrid genre that I
have designed for a hybrid task is what I call scientifiction" (Aramis ix). He
ratherdelightfully has no awareness that this was Hugo Gernsback's original
coinage, in 1929, for what became science fiction, but then he has little to say
directly about the genre, which he passingly dismisses as "inadequate"for his
method (Aramis viii). Nevertheless, this short introductionwill explore how
Latour's work can open a number of productive fronts for sf scholarship,
transvaluinggeneric knowledge in general, but also provingparticularlyhelpful
in theorizing recent hybridgenre fictions.

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BRUNOLATOUR'SSCIENTIFICTION

Of ANTs and Men. In the early part of his career, Latour's central aim, in
common with other historians and sociologists of science, was to use various
strategiesto resituatescience and technology in their perceived relationsto the
social world. Science, as formulated slowly in the West by the scientific
revolutionsfrom the seventeenthto nineteenthcenturies, was rarely interested
in its own history except as a record of error progressively excluded from the
productionof truth.Social factorsonly ever appearin these traditionalscientific
accounts to explain error. False religious belief, smuggled into a leaky and
amateurishlaboratory,produce incorrect objects like telepathy or ESP; false
ideologicalbiases createinstanceslike Lysenkoism.Once these social intrusions
are excluded, falsehood is eliminated and the properpath to truthis regained.
Good science is thereforebeyondany social influences. This divide of social and
technical knowledge produces, for Latour, a damagingpolitical configuration.
The social practiceof Westerndemocracyis always limited by an absoluteoutside-Nature-to which only the scientific expert has privileged access, and
whose facts are beyond dispute. One can have as many different cultural
accounts as one likes, but this multiculturalismis only ever flotsam on the sea
of mononaturalism.The overlaid binariesof social/scientific, political/natural,
subject/object,value/factwork, Latourclaims, "torenderordinary,politicallife
impotentthroughthe threatof incontestableNature" (Politics 10).
Latour developed three early strategies to contest this modern scientific
constitution. The first derived from anthropology.His first book, Laboratory
Life (a collaborationwith Steve Woolgar [1979]), was the productof two years
of participant-observationin an American laboratory. Reversing the usual
directionof the anthropologistfrom centerto margin, anddirectingthe scientific
gaze at science itself, Latour absorbed himself in the "tribe" of laboratory
scientiststo collect fieldworkon the "routinelyoccurringminutiae"of everyday
laboratorybehavior (LabLife 27).2 The materialcollected contestedthe image
of the laboratoryas a sterile, inhumanplace, showingthatthe practiceof science
"widely regardedby outsidersas well organised, logical, and coherent, in fact
consists of a disorderedarrayof observationswith which scientists struggle to
produce order" (Lab Life 36). Some of Latour's central claims emerged from
this work. The laboratoryis a place saturatedwith the social and political, and
the technical cannotbe artificiallydivorced from these concerns, at least in the
process of doing science. The divide is institutedlater, for instance in the
retrospective reconstructionof laboratorypractice in the scientific research
paper. Those incontestable scientific facts or essences are not waiting to be
uncovered, but are the end result of long and laborious procedures that are
messy and confusing.
Yet Latour's point is misunderstoodif he is seen as merely arguingfor the
social construction of science. He develops a critique of semioticians who
upholdan absolutedivide betweenworld andword, realityandlanguage. Latour
argues that the laboratoryis a "configurationof machines" (Lab Life 65), a
multiple, overlapping set of tracking devices that transcribe and translate
materialsubstancesinto grids, graphs, logbooks, codings, diagrams,equations,
andlanguage. The culturalrelativistmight say thatthe objectivereality referred

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SCIENCEFICTIONSTUDIES,VOLUME33 (2006)

to is an end product of these transcriptions,but Latour will later develop the

point that in this complex arrayof inscriptionof the real into signification, "we
never detect the rupture between things and signs and we never face the
impositionof arbitraryand discrete signs on shapeless and continuousmatter"
(Pandora's Hope 56). Latour wants to challenge the rejection of social and
culturalfactors in science, but he is equally concernedto reject facile accounts
thatreduce everythingin science to social constructionor mattersof representation and interpretation.For Latour, this merely reverses the polarity of the
insidious object/subjectdivide, and his later work aims to think about a new
dispensation that cuts across this, by talking about alliances of humans and
nonhumans(see next section, below).
Latourcontinuesto use the methodsof fieldwork, suggestingthatit can open
multiplefrontsof critiquein additionto "latraditionphilosophiquedes commentaires de texts" (Monde Pluriel 6; "the philosophical tradition of textual
commentary").The second strategyof contestationcomes from the history of
science. Scientific practice is often presentist, proceeding by the erasure of
incorrect assumptions,rival hypotheses, and wrong turns. A general tactic to
resocialize science has been to recover the social of history of truth (to use
Steven Shapin'sphrase). This historicisttactic looks at exemplaryinstancesof
the institutionaland ideological formation of scientific naturalism, scientific
controversies(treating"winners"and "losers" symmetrically),or instancesof
lost or abandonedtheories. Latourborrowedmuch of the methodof the English
historiansand sociologists of science sometimes called the EdinburghSchool,
and published The Pasteurization of France in 1988.3 In this study, Louis
Pasteur's genius is analytically decomposed: he is no longer the heroic
discovererof the microbialtransmissionof disease againstunenlightenedrivals
in the mid-nineteenthcentury, but is the master of strategicallycombininghis
laboratory findings with a vast array of different elements and interests that
stretchfar beyond his closed vacuum flasks. In order for his theory to win out,
Pasteur binds together a set of interests that include farmers, army doctors,
Louis Bonaparte,hygienists, newspapers, French nationalism,the bureaucrats
of the Second Empire, cows, industrialists,popular and specialist journals,
transportexperts, andthe FrenchAcademy, as well as the microbesthemselves.
This sort of sociological history of science has become very familiar (it has
partly dislodged the heroic, internalistscientific biography, for instance). Yet
the apparentlychaotic listing of Pasteur's interests, breaching all apparent
categorizationor ordering, has become Latour's signaturedevice. Elsewhere,
he lists some of the interests at play in the crisis aroundthe outbreakof "mad
cow disease" in Europe, includingthe EuropeanUnion, the beef market,prions
in the laboratory,politicians,vegetarians,publicconfidence, farmers,andNobel
prize-winningFrench scientists. "Does this list sound heterogeneous?"Latour
asks. "Too bad-it is indeed this power to establish a hierarchy among
incommensurablepositions for which the collective must now take responsibility" (Politics 113). This listing is the markof Latour'sthird strategyto contest
the modern scientific settlement:the actor-network.

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BRUNOLATOUR'SSCIENTIFICTION

The Pasteurisation of France is the book-length concrete example that

enacted the theory worked out in Latour's most importantearly book, Science
in Action (1987). In this, Latourtraces how a scientist might succeed enough to
make a proposition into a "black box," a statementfixed as an uncontested
scientific fact, with any history of contest or controversy in its production
completely erased. He starts with the small-the rhetoric of the scientific
paper-and builds a model that incorporates more and more elements: the
laboratory, colleagues, funders from industry, government, or the military,
machines, technology transfers, other sciences, the educated public, the
uneducatedpublic, the press, and so on. As before, the aim is to show that
science is thoroughlysocialized andproducedthrough"heterogeneouschainsof
association":"We are never confrontedwith science, technology, and society,
but with a gamutof weaker and strongerassociations"(Science in Action 100101). Althoughthis deliberatelyintermixeselements, Latouris carefulto argue
thata successful statementalso needs to form a disciplinarystructure,a policed
realm of experts and expertise, an inside and an outside. He does not break
down the conditions for rigorous scientific knowledge; however, inverting
received wisdom, he claims that "theharder,the purerthe science is inside, the
furtheroutside the scientists have to go" (Science in Action 156). There is no
suchthingas "pure"science, becausethese are the laboratoriesthathave to seek
the most funding, the most governmental and industrial support. Big
technoscience only survives by connecting itself to the state and the military:
"technoscienceis partof a war machineand shouldbe studiedas such" (Science
in Action 172). Science is thereforesuccessful not to the degree that it isolates
itself from society, but to the degree that it creates networks and multiplies
connections, and to the extent that it can be assessed by "the numberof points
linked, the strength and length of the linkage, the nature of the obstacles"
(Science in Action 201). The starkestsymbol of Latour's rejection of asocial
theories of science is how he presents the equation or formula: the purest,
compressedstatementof incontestableandunchangingfactto some, the equation
is for Latoura knot, somethingthat succeeds because it is so well connected,
tightly binding together as it does the maximumheterogeneouselements into a
single enunciation.
The networkis figuredby Latourthroughmetaphorsof knotsandloops. One
of his most lucid expositions of what elements need to be addressed when
considering any scientific concept (a term he often replaces with "knot")is a
passage in Pandora's Hope (1999). Buildingon the assertionthat "[t]he truthof
what scientists say no longer comes from their breaking away from society,
conventions, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the
circulatingreferences that cascade througha great numberof transformations
and translations"(Pandora 97), Latourlists the five minimalloops thatneed to
be traced: first, mobilizationof the world, which is the complex, variegatedset
of processes for transporting objects from the real world into scientific
discourse; second, autonomization,which is the way a discipline moves from
amateurto professional, forming its own criteria and expertise for scientific
knowledge along the way; third, alliances, which reverse autonomysince here

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SCIENCEFICTIONSTUDIES,VOLUME33 (2006)

diverse, extra-scientific interests are "enrolled"in the supportof a particular

science (kings in cartography,industrialistsin chemistry, the militaryin atomic
physics, and so on); fourth,publicrepresentation,
since "scientistswho had to
travel the world to make it mobile, to convince colleagues to lay siege to
ministersand boards of directors, now have to take care of their relationswith
anotheroutside world of civilians: reporters,pundits, and the man and woman
in the street" (Pandora105); finally, the knotof the scientific concept itself,
harderto study yet part of this topology because it is "a very tight knot at the
centre of a net" (Pandora106).
These ideas helped form Actor-NetworkTheory. This is not solely identified
with Latour,and its origins are often ascribedto a joint paperLatourwrote with
Michel Callon in 1981, entitled "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan." ANT has
since been takenup by some English sociologists, such as John Law, who sees
its value in the productivetensionbetween the centeredactorandthe decentered
network, enabling the critic to move across different scales of explanation.4
Subsuming Latour into the familiar post-structuralism of Lyotard and
Deleuze/Guattari,Law regardsANT as "a semiotic machinefor waging war on
essential differences" (7). Latour has been rather more circumspect:he has
registeredhis suspicionof the terms Actor (he prefers the term actant, since this
might also include nonhumans), Network (which risks becoming a dead
metaphor,a statictopology or grid ratherthansomethingdynamicallyforged by
science in process), and Theory (which Latour claims to avoid as it would
constrainhis ethnomethodologyof following actors in each fresh situation).He
even suspects the hyphenbetween Actor-Networkas fixing a binary between
individual agency and systemic forces that he wished to displace (see "On
RecallingANT"). Latourhas not been able to kill off the term-a lesson perhaps
thata single actorcannotnecessarilycontrolthe network-and has more recently
embraced it fully, publishing Reassemblingthe Social (2005), his first
introductoryexposition of ANT. For Latourthe "maintenet" of ANT "is that
the actors themselves make everything, including their own frames, their own
theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics" ("On Using ANT" 67).
All of Latour's work in Science in Actionand beyond might seem an
aggressive, counter-intuitivesociological theoryof science, intenton dethroning
scientific legitimacy. In fact Latourclaims it is a form of almost naive realism:
as his commentsaboutANT suggest, he claims he has imposednothing, but has
merely followed scientific actorsthemselves, trackinghow they behave, andthe
connectionsand networksthatthey create. Embeddedin all of Latour'swork is
a strong critique of sociological and critical schools that seek "social explanations" of science. Latourdoes not wish to fashionexplanationsthatdecode what
his actors do. He is opposed to the attempt to demystify or expose "real"
conditionsas a Marxistmight, and distanceshimself from sociologies thathave
the arrogantbelief that they can explain the actors any better than the actors
themselves. For Latour, the social as a term of explanation needs to be
rethought:it is not a sort of ether that invisibly permeateseverythingelse as a
hidden context, but is the resultof the associations or links that bind together
scientific, political, cultural, economic, and other practices. He appeals to a

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BRUNOLATOUR'SSCIENTIFICTION

"sociology of associations"to replace all critical sociologies that use predetermined categories for determiningsocial groups. Each social object is a specific
set of associationsthat produces its own terms of analysis.
This approachhas the pragmatist's air of the distrust of any system, and
indeed Latour has more than once appealedto the work of William James to
support his own position. Yet pragmatism can often be a faux-naif stance,
designed to disable critics. Latour's work has undoubtedly become more
explicitly political, and he has taken aim at the political conservatisminherent
in the ideological constructof Science wielded in the Science Warsof the 1990s.
In Politics of Nature (2004), Latourwants to liberatethe practice of the (lower
case, plural)sciences from the ideological strangleholdof (capitalized,singular)
Science. This will accomplishnothingless thanthe revitalizationof democracy,
and may even solve the clash of fundamentalismsbetween East and West, as
explored in his reaction to the events of September 11, War of the Worlds
(2002).
This peace-making desire is perhaps a response to Donna Haraway's
observation that Latour's method and view of scientific practice in Science in
Action was insistently war-like: science works by strenuousbattles to "win"
controversies and outflank rivals, to marshal armies, and so on. The heroic,
masculinistnarrativeof science was being unwittinglyrepeatedby Latour:"The
story told is told by the same story" (Modest_Witness34). This is acute: after
all, the French title of Latour'sbook on Pasteurmight have been more literally
translatedas lTheMicrobes: War and Peace. Yet Latour's irenic turn in the
1990s is attributablenot just to Haraway's critique, but also to the influence of
the French philosopherand historianof science Michel Serres, who in a booklength interview with Latourspoke of working "in a spirit of pacifism" against
the contest of the faculties (Serres 32). Finally, though, his turnto the political
was drivenby the challenge Latourmountedin WeHave Never Been Modem to
the war set up between subjectsandobjectsby the modernsettlement.Let's now
turn to this importantpolemical intervention.
The Modern Settlement and Latour's Nonmodernism. Fromhis early books,
we already have a sense that Latour regards the scientific revolutions of the
seventeenth century as a very particularorganization of the world. This is
formulatedas the modern constitutionor settlement in We Have Never Been
Modem, a separation of Nature and Culture into two distinct ontologies;
according to Latour, modernity works obsessively at "purification," the
categorizing of the world according to a binary that sorts humans from
nonhumans,subjectsfromobjects. A politics emerges fromthis dispensationthat
is inflexible andoften violent: natureis to be dominated;othercultures, refusing
to accept the disciplining of the progressive, linear time of modernity, are
regardedas objects, sunkin nature.Savages andsuperstitionsmix the social and
the natural indiscriminately; science progressively separates these spheres.
"Modernisationconsists in continuallyexiting from an obscure age thatmingled
the needs of society with scientific truthin orderto enter into a new age thatwill
finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes
from humans"(We Have Never 71).

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10

SCIENCEFICTIONSTUDIES,VOLUME33 (2006)

For Latour, this modem constitutionhas always operatedimperfectly: it is

involved in a "doublecreationof a social context and a naturethat escapes that
very context" (16), and yet regardsNature (the guarantorof scientific truth)as
pre-givenandextra-discursive.If NatureandCultureare co-produced,however,
they are in constantcontact and dialogue, conductingendless translationsand
mediations. The fury of purificationis driven by a secret history of miscegenation, of the intermixing of categories. We have never been modem. Latour
argues that this realization has been thruston us by recent developmentsthat
confrontus with a rapid proliferationof hybrid objects that confound modem
categories. Are ozone holes, global warming, AIDS, epidemics of obesity and
allergy, hospitalsuperbugs,Asian bird flu, and mad cow disease the productof
natural or cultural, human or nonhuman, processes? They cannot be
"sorted"-categorized or resolved-in any straightforwardway. Indeed, in the
case of global warming, the passageto black-boxedfact is continuallyfrustrated
and scientific argument inextricably intermingled with political, industrial,
ecological, and myriadother interests. We have moved from "mattersof fact"
to "mattersof concem," situatingthe practiceof science in wider networksand
longer chains of association.
This transitionhas been discussedby some critics as the passage from an era
of Science to one of Research, a move from autonomyto the imbricationof
science, culture, and economy: "all these domainshad become so 'intemally'
heterogeneousand 'externally'interdependent,even transgressive,thattheyhad
ceased to be distinctiveand distinguishable"(Nowotny et al. 1). Latoursees it
as the recognitionof the very hybriditythat was always inducedby the modem
settlement. Hybrid objects "have no clear boundaries, no sharp separation
between their own hard kemel and their environment,"he expands in Politics
of Nature: "Theyfirst appearas mattersof concern, as new entitiesthatprovoke
perplexity and thus speech in those who gather aroundthem, and argue over
them" (Politics 24, 66). He suggests we need a re-formulationof the binaries
thatrecognizes this increasinglypopulousexcludedmiddle, a space in which we
need to graspthe "nonseparabilityof quasi-objectsandquasi-subjects" (WeHave
Never 139). This would in turnproduce a new constitutionand thereforea new
politics: "It is time, perhaps, to speak of democracyagain, but of a democracy
extendedto things themselves" (We Have Never 141).
Latour's polemic appeared at the time when many critical accounts of
modemity were being producedunderthe umbrellaof postmodernism.Some of
his formulationsmight look postmodern-perhaps most obviously the idea that
abandoningthe linear time of modernity will open up multiple, co-existent
times.5 Yet Latouris scathing about the postmodernturn. Whetherit is JeanFrancois Lyotard's collapse of metanarratives into the "petits recits" of
incommensurablelanguage games or JiirgenHabermas'sargumentagainstthe
postmodernsfor a return to separatespheres of knowledge, Latourconsiders
these as desperaterearguardactions to maintainthe purificationthatdominated
the modern settlement. The modish Jean Baudrillardexemplifies for Latoura
pointlesspickingover the ruinsof the modern,incapableof conceiving any other
dispensationand sunk in nihilism. In this decadentphase, Latourworries that

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BRUNO LATOUR'S SCIENTIFICTION

11

critiquehas collapsed into extreme relativismor conspiracytheory ("Why Has

Critique Run Out of Steam?" 228). He sees this as sharing much with a
regressive anti-modernview that is preparedto annihilateall the virtues of the
Enlightenmentalong with its vices.
Instead, Latour declares himself a nonmodernist: "We can keep the
Enlightenmentwithoutmodernity"(WeHave Never 135). This stancecrucially
involves makingthe subject/objectdivide far more porous, and rethinkingand
extendingmodem humanism,which has sortedaccording"to a small numberof
powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothingbut simple mute forces" (We
Have Never 138). The constitutionneeds to be reconfiguredso thathumansand
nonhumansare networkedtogether in a new kind of collective. This collective
has been envisionedby Latourin Politics of Nature, where "democracycan only
be conceived if it can freely traversethe borderbetween science andpolitics, in
order to add a series of new voices to the discussion ... the voices of
nonhumans"(69). That compulsive need of the modernsto purify is not simply
dissolved (it is still helpful to have these categories), but the nonmodernist
values acts of linkage, association, and heterogeneousassemblage:
Weshallalwaysgo fromthemixedto thestillmoremixed,fromthecomplicated
to thestillmorecomplicated....We no longerexpectfromthefuturethatit will
emancipate
us fromall ourattachments;
on thecontrary,we expectthatit will
attachus withtighterbondsto the morenumerouscrowdsof alienswho have
becomefully-fledgedmembersof thecollective.(Politics191)
This is the maturevision of Latour's later work.
Criticism of Latour's work is often tied to methodologicalquestionsin the
sociology of science. The key objectionis termedby Simon Schaffer "theheresy
of hylozoism, an attributionof purpose, will and life to inanimatematter, and
of humanintereststo the nonhuman"(182). David Bloor has similarlyobjected,
in muchharsherterms, to Latour'stransgressionof the foundationalphilosophical axioms of modernsociology (see also Elam). Latour'sdefense ranges from
the disarmingly honest (he suggests to one group of interviewers that his
philosophical apparatusis really "not very deep" [Crease 19]), to the more
serious view that Bloor's sociology quintessentiallybelongs to the modern
settlementitself, relying as it does on the strictKantiandivorce of subjectiveand
objective worlds that Latour is specifically trying to unravel ("For David
Bloor"). It is of course a provocationto talk aboutthe "interests"or "voices"'
of nonhumans,and it is in total conflict with the hermeneuticsthatstill dominate
critique. Yet perhapsreadersof SFS are less traumatizedby this move thanthe
philosophers of STS. Not only are we more familiar with interdisciplinary
formulations of post-humanism (for instance, in Donna Haraway's recent
attemptsto articulatea "companionspecies" kinship as part of a wider critique
of modernity:see her "Cyborgsto CompanionSpecies"), but also because the
fantasmaticwork of sf has been consistently bound up with imagining the
interestsof the nonhuman,andhas been fascinatedwith the productionof those
hybrid forms the modernsettlementwould deem monstrous.

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12

SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

Implications for SF. I hope thatthis brief survey of Latour'swork has already
begun to sparkpotentialways of reading sf, even as his work veers across both
the forms of critique and the modern/postmodernparadigmthat has tended to
dominatesf criticism in recent times. Here, I just want to sketch out the ways
in which I think Latourcan enable new directions in sf scholarship.
First, it is obvious that there cannot be a Latourian theory that can be
abstractedand subsequently applied to sf, like all those theoretical canning
factories that process the raw material of sf and turn it into the product of a
particularschool. Instead, sf can be thoughtof as a link that can be tied into
many different kinds of chains of association or networks of influence,
sometimes in surprising or unpredictableways. This is how it appears in
Latour's own Aramis, his "scientifictional"study of a revolutionarytransport
project for Paris that failed in the 1980s. As Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint
explore later in this issue, Aramis is presented in a cacophony of voices:
political, industrial, financial, and technological interest groups are cited
directly, interspersedwith a dialogue between a cynical professor and a naive
STS student;this cacophony is in turn cut across by fragmentsof a theory of
technology, along with lengthy citations from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Shelley's proto-sf text helps Latour imagine the way in which large
technoscientificprojectsare stitchedtogetherwith improvisedelements, which
can then escape designed intentionsanddevelop their own "nonhuman"actions.
This mythic structurewas also in the minds of manydifferentparticipantsin the
Aramis case: it was formative, rather than secondary or reflective. Sf might
appearlike this in other stories: for example, in the oft-told way that the genre
contributed formatively to the military-scientific-industrialproductionof the
nuclear bomb. H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914) was one of the
importantlinks in Leo Szilard's ardentpolitical campaigningfor an American
atomic program; Wells was then hooked into a very different (and in the end
weaker) networkof resourcesfor the atomic scientistslobbyingto stop first-use
of the bomb, and then for world governmentafter first-use.
We might also think in Latourian ways about the weird networks of
connections that produce science-fictional religions-one of the more striking
phenomena associated with the genre since 1945. Hubbard's Dianetics took
resources from experimental psychology, the discourse of the American
engineer, space-operaplots, and John W. Campbell's messianic belief in the
socially transformativepotential of sf. The Raelian group similarly binds
together genetics and cloning with an eschatology borrowed from Arthur C.
Clarke. These networks of association might be weak, thinly populated, and
definitively marginal, but Latour allows us to read how these bizarrely
heterogeneous formations operate. The complex socio-politico-scientific
embeddednessof sf could be considerably clarified by Latour's approachto
networks and assemblages, chains of weaker and stronger associationthat cut
across science, technology, and society.
Second, and consequently, the dynamic topology of the network does
somethingto displace the static topographiesof center and marginor high and
low. It is not necessarily useful to dissolve these categories entirely (there is a

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certain rigidity to the economics of genre publishing, after all), but they might
be regardedas less finally determiningfor sf. Instead, the genre might be seen
to intermixmore dynamically, making weaker or strongerassociations across
the matrix of culturalpower. Sometimes sf becomes a privileged lens through
which a lot of social processes can be translatedfor the wider culture-as in
cyberpunkin the 1980s (justat the time when sf writers such as LarryNiven and
JerryPournellesuccessfully connectedintothe circuitsof the New RightReagan
administration).At othertimes sf remainsmarginal,decoupledfrommainstream
cultural formations and with few kudos. This marginality can of course
sometimes generate genuine subculturalenergy (as in the American political
satires of the 1950s or the writings of the British Boom in the 1990s, for
instance).
This approachwould also be interested in the hybridizationsof different
genres that Gary Wolfe has called "the postgenre fantastic" or "genre
implosion"-the mixes of Gothic, thriller, detective fiction, fantasy, and sf that
have proliferatedin recent years. Sf criticismhas been somewhatobsessed with
purification,with the kind of sorting and rigid categorizationLatourargues is
typical of the modem settlement. Criticism, instead, might be much more
interested in cross-fertilizations between genre and mainstreamwriting and
mightjudge generic transgressionsless punitively. If we read the history of sf
as nonmodernists, it might then appear that the genre has never been modern-that it was never a pure form and has produced little except "hybrid"
writings (a position I tried to argue in my book Science Fiction). This may
involve dispensingwith some of the subculturalressentimentthatstill attendsthe
genre. Purism is isolationism, which means fewer connections and therefore
weaker culturalinfluence.
Third, Latour's sense that we live a world of proliferatinghybrids might
actually help us read recent sf. Several instances spring to mind. China
Mieville's New Weird is a fusion of English Gothic, dark fantasy, and sf
traditions,andhis fictions are frequentlyorganizedaroundspectacularset-pieces
of hybrid creaturesthat cut across received categorizations.The ichthyscaphoi
in Iron Council (2004) is "a mongrel of whale-sharkdistendedby bio-thaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized,varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a
man in ganglia protruberantlike prolapsedveins, boat-sized fins swinging on
oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely" (454). This clatterof
adjectival over-determinationis Mieville's principal strategy, and reads very
much like one of Latour's lists of heterogeneouselements, combininghuman,
animal, and machine. A similarfascinationwith hybridbeings and transformed
modes of categorizationinforms JustinaRobson's NaturalHistory (2003).
Yet reading sf by means of Latour does not privilege those hybrid forms
usually associatedwith softer sf. Indeed, Latour's insistentfocus on the social
andpoliticalconnectionsof science andtechnologyalso meanshe is illuminating
in readingmuch hardersf traditions.An exemplarytext in this regardmight be
Paul McAuley's WhiteDevils (2004), which is typical of certaintrendsin many
ways. The generic location of McAuley's novel is extremely difficult to
determine: it continues the author's move from space opera to crossover

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SCIENCEFICTIONSTUDIES,VOLUME33 (2006)

technothriller.It is a breathlessand kinetic low entertainment,but one studded

with contemplative passages that resonate with Conrad's Heart of Darkness
(1902) and Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and it contains the
exorbitantviolence of the JohnWebsterrevenge tragedyfrom which it takes its
name. McAuley also slices throughthe distinctionbetween "hard"and "soft"
sf. WhiteDevils is undoubtedlyhardsf: it is the kind of book thatwants to teach
the reader the distinction between mitochondrialand genomic DNA, and its
imaginarysciences are extrapolatedfrom currentbiotech research. Yet it is also
fascinatedwith subjectivityand traumaticbreaches of humanidentity, the kind
of material long identified with soft sf. The hybridizationof these traditions
refuses to continue a long factional war-but refuses, in Latourianterms,
precisely becauseof the productionof new hybridsthatrequirea reconfiguration
of the subject/objector human/nonhumandivide.
WhiteDevils explicitly thematizeshow Science has given way to an era of
Research, presenting a messy and confused world where the laboratory is
inextricably mixed with politics, aid agencies, and "open-source late-stage
capitalism" (141). The pure scientist is described as a "relict species.... You
exist in a marginalenvironment.Always you must strugglefor funds, scrapsof
endowments,sponsorship,andalways you mustwork harderfor less andless....
The nineteenth-centuryculture of science's Golden Age ... was destroyed"
(314). McAuley's Africa has become a site for heavily capitalized illicit
research, released from any regulationor ethics. It has resultedin the proliferation of hybridobjects and new actantsthat cannoteasily be sorted accordingto
the modem settlement. The pandemic of the "plastic disease," for example,
results from gene manipulation,so that insects transportmaterial originally
designed to make hydrocarbonsin plants: "in the last stages of the disease, the
victims are turnedinto grotesqueliving statues,paralysedby hard,knottystrings
and lumps of polymer under their skin and muscles" (24). The inability to
distinguishhuman and nonhumanis what drives the thriller plot, these terms
regularly and feverishly inverting. Are the white devils human or genetic
reconstructions of pre-human hominids? What happens when researchers
actively seek to dethronehumanpriority,cloning extinctrivals?Oneprotagonist
trackingdown the white devil "atrocities"is discovered to be less human than
thought, and the terrain of the Democratic Republic of Congo is full of
monstrosities. Yet the monsters at the core of the tale prove more humanthan
some of their pursuers. In this, there is anotherrevision of the sensibility that
sustainedConrad or Wells: in a world of hybrids, there can be no monsters.
AlthoughIstvanCsicsery-Ronayhas arguedfor a postmodemgrotesque,where
"anomalous deviations ... are norms" (72), it may be that the horror of
transgressionthathas powered the Gothic and the Grotesquewould have to be
wholly reconceived once the modem obsession with sorting, categorizing, and
purifyinghas been displaced.
Anotherset of texts thatvirtuallyenact Latour'sinsistenceon networksand
tangled objects is Kim Stanley Robinson'songoing series aboutthe science and
politics of global warming, which so far includesFortySigns of Rain (2004) and
Fifty Degrees Below (2005). Latour has used global warming as an instance

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where "mattersof concern"supersede"mattersof fact. " Robinson'sbooks stage

the disputes over evidence of climate change and the attempts of scientific
researchers, political advisors, laboratory workers, funding bureaucrats,
senators,mathematicmodelers,displacedTibetans,traumatizedsociobiologists,
andothersto persuadea Republicangovernmentto acknowledgethe crisis in the
midst of extreme weather events. What heterogeneousalliance can be forged
against the hegemonic bloc of rapacious capital? The strategy of forming
alliances and networks that cut across diverse and heterogeneous sites is
explicitly worked out in the novels; the pleasingly odd centralcharacterbegins
as a reductive sociobiologist, but develops an understandingof the politics of
science that values the need for "impure"connections, making diverse and
surprisinglinks. Withwork like this from so-called "hard"sf (one mightfurther
include Gregory Benford or Greg Bear as writers modeling the associative
networks of science), the modern dispensationthat sustained the distinction
between hardand soft within the genre may be largely superseded,as the social
and the scientific find themselves continually imbricated.Thinkingabouttheir
work throughLatourwould demandthis supersessionas a redundantdispensation of the modernconstitution.
It may be, then, that Latour'swork is useful not only as yet anothercritical
resource to overlay onto fiction but also as a useful guide to articulatingthe
hybridityof recent sf. It links sf into a network of associationsthat registers a
transformationof scientific authorityin the contemporaryworld, helping to
explain why sf has become such a vital node in the collective for thinking
throughour contemporarymattersof anxious concern.
NOTES
1. For law, see La Fabrique;for religion, see Jubiler; for art, see Latourand Peter,
Iconoclash; for recent commentaryon critique, see "Why Has Critique Run Out of
Steam?"
2. Latourtrainedfirst as an anthropologist,doing fieldwork in the Ivory Coast. He
has spoken about the influence of Marc Auge on the attemptto create a "symmetrical
anthropology"-that is, one that does not presume superiorityof West over East or
observer over observed, and that can employ anthropologicalmethod reversibly (see
Latour, Un Monde Pluriel).
3. Work from the EdinburghSchool (now long dispersed) includes that of Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Latour has translated a number of works of English
sociology and history of science into French, but has ongoing methodologicaldisputes
with a number of English counterparts,most recently with David Bloor: see Bloor's
"Anti-Latour"and Latour's reply, "For David Bloor." A helpful starting point is
Schaffer's lengthy review of Latour's Pasteurisationof France.
4. JohnLaw also runsthe Actor NetworkResourcewebsite; see < http://www.lancs.
ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm> .
5. In fact, this borrows heavily from Michel Serres's arguments for a multitemporalitythat confoundsconventionalhistoriography:"An object, a circumstance,is
polychronic, multitemporal,and reveals a time that is gatheredtogether, with multiple
pleats" (Serres and Latour 60). For Serres, this is part of a simultaneity of widely
distributedhistoricalresourcesthatentirely refuse any of the kinds of rupturalnarrative

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SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

usually associated with postmodernism.For more conceptuallinks between Serres and

Latour, see LauraSalisbury's essay in this issue.
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ABSTRACT
This essay introducesthe work of controversialhistorianandphilosopherof science and
technology, BrunoLatour. It suggests thathis theories of hybridobjects, his analyses of
networks that criss-cross normallydiscrete categories of science, politics, and culture,
and his displacement of the modern/postmodernparadigm can offer productive new
readingsof science fiction, permittingcritics to rethinkthe genre's relationto science and
society. Latour's own "scientifictions"(his coinage) are examined alongside works by
sf authorsChina Mieville, Paul McAuley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

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