Interview with Bruno Latour by Hugh Crawford (Citation TBA)

“It is strange to say, but I think much of postmodernism is scientistic. Of course they no longer believe in the promises of science—they leave that to the moderns—but they do something worse: they believe in the ahuman character of science, and still more of technology. For them, technology is completely out of the old humanity; and as for science, it is almost extraterrestrial. Of course, they do not see that state of affairs as bad. They are not indignant at the ahuman dimension of technology—again they leave that indignation to the moderns—no, they like it. They relish its completely naked, sleek, ahuman aspect. In other words, they accept the disenchantment argument, but they just take it as a positive feature instead of a negative one. It think that is deeply reactionary because in the end, you push forward the idea that science and technology are something extraordinary, completely foreign to human history and to anthropology. . . Those who agree that capitalism is really deterritorialized, technology is really sleek, discourse really empty, society a real simulacrum, and science totally and fully unhuman, abandon the filed without having fought” (253).

“I think now the only way to achieve Bloor’s goal is through what Michel Callon calls the generalized principle of symmetry. It goes like this: let’s treat society and nature symmetrically. This new symmetry principle is much different from Bloor because Bloor is a radical Durkheimian thinker, which is to say that society ‘up there’ should be able to explain true and false belief in the same terms—the inputs of nature being necessary to anchor our beliefs, but not to shape them” (256).

“There is a complete similarity between the internal divide between the representation of human and of nonhuman and the external divide between the cultures” (258).

“Suddenly we realize that a supermarket, a laboratory, and a machine are not made from ingredients radically different from the past; they only have slight differences which have to be empirically recovered. Of course, when viewed from a postmodernists point this is totally reactionary, but it is not anitmodern. It is simply not modern (in the sense I have given) because it does not make the distinction between the representation of humans and the representation of nonhumans . . . Now that we know that there is no such thing as the representation of the human and the representation of the nonhuman; they are mixed in whichever subject you take” (259).

“I think the one traditional line with realism on one end and cotnructivism on the other is now being crossed by a traverse line which shows that you do not need to believe in the existence of either of these two poles. In other words, neither the social groups nor objective nature play the role that is expected of them” (260-261).

“So these hybrids (quasi-objects) start resembling what our world is made of. It is not that there are a few hybrids; it is that there are only hybrids” (261).

“I want to accommodate the nonhumans in the fabric of our society” (262).

“So actor-network and quasi-object are exactly the same word. Just one of the many words we have to invent and use and drop after a while in order to trace and define a social relation that is not social and a natural relation that is not naturalized” (262-263).

“The whole notion of actor-network theory is not a theory well packaged argument, but the rule is simple: do not use culture, the content of science, or discourse as the cause of a phenomenon. So the vocabulary of actor-network theory is voluntarily poor. It is not a metalanguage, but an infralanguage” (263).

“Appropriation is a typically modernist term that means, of course, that there is a rightful owner. Now the notion of translation or delegation is that this is never the case, which means there is not misrepresentation. In literary criticism, most of the repertoire is to track down and to police metaphor, which has a right use and a literal sense. Now with delegation or translation, you never find the right usage, which also means that there is a lot of interesting things happening in the literary field. The point is that we don’t misappropriate words” (266).

“The critic is a sort of policeman or ‘justice of the peace’ who adjudicates the meaning of all these words. To me the interesting task is not the policing, but following the translation. What I am now interested in is how many ways there are to translate” (266).