Latour - Do You Believe in Reality.pdf

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Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, Essays on the Reality of Science Study, 1999.

their bygone research programs—but, on the whole, let's say yes. Why are

you asking me these questions? Who do you think I am?"

I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the

monster he was seeing me as when he raised these questions and his touching

openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have

taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in

his view, the whole establishment of science, one of these people from a

mysterious field called "science studies," of which he had never before met a

flesh-and-blood representative but which-at least so he had been told—was

another threat to science in a country, America, where scientific inquiry had

never had a completely secure foothold.

He was a highly respected psychologist, and we had both been invited by

the Wenner-Grenn Foundation to a gathering made up of two-thirds

scientists and one-third "science students." This division itself, announced by

the organizers, baffled me. How could we be pitted

against

the scientists? That

we are studying a subject matter does not mean that we are attacking it. Are

biologists anti-life, astronomers anti-stars, immunologists anti-antibodies?

Besides, I had taught for twenty years in scientific schools, I wrote regularly

in scientific journals, I and my colleagues lived on contract research carried

out on behalf of many groups of scientists in industry and in the academy.

Was I not part of the French scientific establishment? I was a bit vexed to be

excluded so casually. Of course I am just a philosopher, but what would my

friends in science studies say? Most of them have been trained in the

sciences, and several of them, at least, pride themselves on

extending

the

scientific outlook to science itself. They could be labeled as members of

another discipline or another subfield, but certainly not as "anti-scientists"

meeting halfway with scientists, as if the two groups were opposing armies

conferring under a flag of truce before returning to the battlefield!

I could not get over the strangeness of the question posed by this man I

considered a colleague, yes, a colleague (and who has since become a good

friend). If science studies has achieved anything, I thought, surely it has

added

reality to science, not withdrawn any from it. Instead of the stuffed scientists

hanging on the walls of the armchair philosophers of science of the past, we

have portrayed lively characters, immersed in their laboratories, full of

passion, loaded with

Chapter 1: “Do You Believe in Reality?”

News from the Trenches of the Science Wars

"I have a question for you," he said, taking out of his pocket a crumpled

piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words. He took a breath:

"Do you believe in reality?"

"But of course!" I laughed. "What a question! Is reality something we

have to believe in?"

He had asked me to meet him for a private discussion in a place I found

as bizarre as the question: by the lake near the chalet, in this strange imitation

of a Swiss resort located in the tropical mountains of

" Teresopolis in

Brazil. Has reality truly become something people have to believe in, I

wondered, the answer to a serious question asked in a hushed and

embarrassed tone? IS reality something like God, the topic of a confession

reached after a long and intimate discussion? Are there people on earth who

don't

believe in reality?

When I noticed that he was relieved by my quick and laughing answer, I

was even more baffled, since his relief proved clearly enough that he had

anticipated a

negative

reply, something like "Of course not! Do you think I am

that naive?" This was not a joke, then: he really was concerned, and his query

had been in earnest.

"I have two more questions," he added, sounding more relaxed. "Do we

know more than we used to?"

"But of course! A thousand times more!"

"But is science cumulative?" he continued with some anxiety, as if he did

not want to be won over too fast.

"I guess so," I replied, "although I am less positive on this one, since the

sciences also forget so much, so much of their past and so much of

instruments, steeped in know-how, closely connected to a larger and more

vibrant milieu. Instead of the pale and bloodless objectivity of science, we

have all shown, it seemed to me, that the many nonhumans mixed into our

collective life through laboratory practice have a history, flexibility, culture,

blood—in short, all the characteristics that were denied to them by the

humanists on the other side of the campus. Indeed, I naively thought, if

scientists have a faithful ally, it is we, the "science students" who have

managed over the years to interest scores of literary folk in science and

technology, readers who were convinced, until science studies came along,

that "science does not think" as Heidegger, one of their masters, had said.

The psychologist's suspicion struck me as deeply unfair, since he did not

seem to understand that in this guerrilla warfare being conducted in the no-

man's-land between the "two cultures,"

we were the ones

being attacked by

militants, activists, sociologists, philosophers, and technophobes of all hues,

precisely because of our interest in the inner workings of scientific facts. Who

loves the sciences, I asked myself, more than this tiny scientific tribe that has

learned to open up facts, machines, and theories with all their roots, blood

vessels, networks, rhizomes, and tendrils? Who believes more in the

objectivity of science than those who claim that it can be turned into an

object of inquiry?

Then I realized that I was wrong. What I would call "adding realism to

science" was actually seen, by the scientists at this gathering, as a threat to the

calling of science, as a way of decreasing its stake in truth and their claims to

certainty. How has this misunderstanding come about? How could I have

lived long enough to be asked in all seriousness this incredible question: "Do

you believe in reality?" The distance between what I thought we had achieved

in science studies and what was implied by this question was so vast that I

needed to retrace my steps a bit. And so this book was born.

intellectual history that should at least be sketched. Without this detour we

would never be able to fathom the extent of the misunderstanding between

my colleague and me, or to measure the extraordinary form of radical realism

that science studies has been uncovering.

I remembered that my colleague's question was not so new. My

compatriot Descartes had raised it against himself when asking how an

isolated mind could be

absolutely

as opposed to relatively sure of anything

about the outside world. Of course, he framed his question in a way that

made it impossible to give the only reasonable answer, which we in science

studies have slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are

relatively

sure

of many of the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice

of our laboratories. By Descartes's time this sturdy relativism*, based on the

number of relations established with the world, was already in the past, a

once-passable path now lost in a thicket of brambles. Descartes was asking

for absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat, a certainty that was not needed

when the brain (or the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body

thoroughly involved n its normal ecology. As in Curt Siodmak's novel

Donovan's Brain,

absolute certainty is the sort of neurotic fantasy that only a

surgically removed mind would look for after it had lost everything else. Like

a heart taken out of a young woman who has just died in an accident and

soon to be transplanted into someone else's thorax thousands of miles away

Descartes's mind requires artificial life-support to keep it viable. Only a mind

put in the strangest position, looking at a world

from the inside out

and linked to

the outside by nothing but the tenuous connection of the

gaze,

will throb in

the constant fear of losing reality; only such a bodiless observer will desper-

ately look for some absolute life-supporting survival kit.

For Descartes the only route by which his mind-in-a-vat could reestablish

some reasonably sure connection with the outside world was through God.

My friend the psychologist was thus right to phrase his query using the same

formula I had learned in Sunday school: "Do you believe in reality?"—

"Credo in unum Deum," or rather, "Credo in unam realitam," as my friend

Donna Haraway kept chanting in Teresopolis! After Descartes, however,

many people thought that going through God to reach the world was a bit

expensive and farfetched. They looked for a shortcut. They wondered

whether the

The Strange Invention of an "Outside" World

There is no natural situation on earth in which someone could be asked this

strangest of all questions: "Do you believe in reality?" To ask such a question

one has to become so

distant

from reality that the fear of

losing

it entirely

becomes plausible—and this fear itself has an

world could

directly

send us enough information to produce a stable image of

itself in our minds.

But in asking this question the empiricists kept going along the same

path. They did not retrace their steps. They never plugged the wriggling and

squiggling brain back into its withering body. They were still dealing with a

mind looking through the gaze at a lost outside world. They simply tried to

train it to recognize patterns. God was out, to be sure, but the

tabula rasa

the empiricists was as disconnected as the mind in Descartes's times. The

brain-in-a-vat simply exchanged one survival kit for another. Bombarded by a

world reduced to meaningless stimuli, it was supposed to extract from these

stimuli everything it needed to recompose the world's shapes and stories. The

result was like a badly connected TV set, and no amount of tuning made this

precursor of neural nets produce more than a fuzzy set of blurry lines, with

white points falling like snow. No shape was recognizable. Absolute certainty

was lost, so precarious were the connections of the senses to a world that was

pushed ever further outside. There was too much static to get any clear

picture.

The solution came, but in the form of a catastrophe from which we are

only now beginning to extricate ourselves. Instead of retracing their steps and

taking the other path at the forgotten fork in the road, philosophers

abandoned even the claim to absolute certainty, and settled instead on a

makeshift solution that preserved at least some access to an outside reality.

Since the empiricists' associative neural net was unable to offer clear pictures

of the lost world, this must prove, they said, that the mind (still in a vat)

extracts

from itself

everything it needs to form shapes and stories. Everything,

that is, except the reality itself. Instead of the fuzzy lines on the poorly tuned

TV set, we got the fixed tuning grid, molding the confused static, dots, and

lines of the empiricist channel into a steady picture held in place by the mind-

set's predesigned categories. Kant's

a priori

started this extravagant form of

constructivism, which neither Descartes, with his detour through God, nor

Hume, with his shortcut to associated stimuli, would ever have dreamed of.

Now, with the Konigsberg broadcast, everything was ruled by the mind

itself and reality came in simply to say that it was there, indeed, and not

imaginary! For the banquet of reality, the mind provided the

food, and the inaccessible things-in-themselves to which the world had been

reduced simply dropped by to say "We are here, what you eat is not dust,"

but otherwise remained mute and stoic guests. If we abandon absolute

certainty, Kant said, we can at least retrieve universality as long as we remain

inside the restricted sphere of science, to which the world outside contributes

decisively but minimally. The rest of the quest for the absolute is to be found

in morality, another

a priori

certainty that the mind-in-the-vat extracts from its

own wiring. Under the name of a "Copernican Revolution"* Kant invented

this science-fiction nightmare: the outside world now turns around the mind-

in-the-vat, which dictates most of that world's laws, laws it has extracted from

itself without help from anyone else. A crippled despot now ruled the world

of reality. This philosophy was thought, strangely enough, to be the deepest

of all, because it had at once managed to abandon the quest for absolute

certainty and to retain it under the banner of "universal

a prioris,"

a clever

sleight of hand that hid the lost path even deeper in the thickets.

Do we really have to swallow these unsavory pellets of textbook

philosophy to understand the psychologist's question? I am afraid so, because

otherwise the innovations of science studies will remain invisible. The worst

is yet to come. Kant had invented a form of constructivism in which the

mind-in-the-vat built everything by itself but not entirely without constraints:

what it learned from itself had to be universal and could be elicited only by

some experiential contact with a reality out there, a reality reduced to its

barest minimum, but there nonetheless. For Kant there was still something

that revolved around the crippled despot, a green planet around this pathetic

sun. It would not be long before people realized that this "transcendental

Ego," as Kant named it, was a fiction, a line in the sand, a negotiating

position in a complicated settlement to avoid the complete loss of the world

or the complete abandonment of the quest for absolute certainty. It was soon

replaced by a more reasonable candidate,

society*.

Instead of a mythical Mind

giving shape to reality, carving it, cutting it, ordering it, it was now the

prejudices, categories, and paradigms of a group of people living together that

determined the representations of every one of those people. This new

definition, however, in spite of the use of the word "social," had only a

superficial resemblance to

the realism to which we science students have become attached, and which I

will outline over the course of this book.

First, this replacement of the despotic Ego with the sacred "society" did

not retrace the philosophers' steps but went even

further

in distancing the

individual's vision, now a "view of the world," from the definitely lost outside

world. Between the two, society interposed its filters; its paraphernalia of

biases, theories, cultures, traditions, and standpoints became an opaque

window. Nothing of the world could pass through so many intermediaries

and reach the individual mind. People were now locked not only into the

prison of their own categories but into that of their social groups as well.

Second, this "society" itself was just a series of minds-in-a-vat, many minds

and many vats to be sure, but each of them still composed of that strangest

of beasts: a detached mind gazing at an outside world. Some improvement! If

prisoners were no longer in isolated cells, they were now confined to the

same dormitory, the same collective mentality. Third, the next shift, from one

Ego to multiple cultures, jeopardized the only good thing about Kant, that is,

the universality of the

a priori

categories, the only bit of ersatz absolute

certainty he had been able to retain. Everyone was not locked in the same

prison any more; now there were

many

prisons, incommensurable,

unconnected. Not only was the mind disconnected from the world, but each

collective mind, each culture was disconnected from the others. More and

more progress in a philosophy dreamed up, it seems, by prison wardens.

But there was a fourth reason, even more dramatic, even sadder, that

made this shift to "society" a catastrophe following fast on the heels of the

Kantian revolution. The claims to knowledge of all these poor minds,

prisoners in their long rows of vats, were now made part of an even more

bizarre history, were now associated with an even more ancient threat,

the fear

of mob rule.

If my friend's voice quivered as he asked me "Do you believe in

reality?" it was not only because he feared that all connection with the outside

world might be lost, but above all because he worried that I might answer,

"Reality depends on whatever the mob thinks is right at any given time." It is

the resonance of these two fears, the

loss

of any certain access to reality and

the invasion by the mob, that makes his question at once so unfair and so

serious.

But before we disentangle this second threat, let me finish with the first

one. The sad story, unfortunately, does not end here. However incredible it

seems, it is possible to go even further along the wrong path, always thinking

that a more radical solution will solve the problems accumulated from the

past decision. One solution, or more exactly another clever sleight of hand, is

to become so very pleased with the loss of absolute certainty and universal

prioris

that one rejoices in abandoning them. Every defect of the former

position is now taken to be its best quality. Yes, we have lost the world. Yes,

we are forever prisoners of language. No, we will never regain certainty. No,

we will never get beyond our biases. Yes, we will forever be stuck within our

own selfish standpoint. Bravo! Encore! The prisoners are now gagging even

those who ask them to look out their cell windows; they will "deconstruct,"

as they say—which means destroy in slow motion—any-one who reminds

them that there was a time when they were free and when their language bore

a connection with the world.

Who can avoid hearing the cry of despair that echoes deep down,

carefully repressed, meticulously denied, in these paradoxical claims for a

joyous, jubilant, free construction of narratives and stories by people forever

in chains? But even if there

were

people who could say such things with a

blissful and light heart (their existence is as uncertain to me as that of the

Loch Ness monster, or, for that matter, as uncertain as that of the real world

would be to these mythical creatures), how could we avoid noticing that we

have not moved an inch since Descartes? That the mind is still in its vat,

excised from the rest, disconnected, and contemplating (now with a blind

gaze) the world (now lost in darkness) from the very same bubbling

glassware? Such people may be able to smile smugly instead of trembling with

fear, but they are still descending further and further along the spiraling

curves of the same hell. At the end of this chapter we will meet these gloating

prisoners again.

In our century, though, a second solution has been proposed, one that

has occupied many bright minds. This solution consists of taking only a

part

of the mind out of the vat and then doing the obvious thing, that is, offering

it a body again and putting the reassembled aggregate back into relation with

a world that is no longer a spectacle at which we gaze but a lived, self-evident,

and unreflexive extension of ourselves. In appearance, the progress is

immense, and the descent into damnation suspended, since we no longer

have a mind dealing with an outside world, but a lived world to which a semi-

conscious and intentional body is now attached.

Unfortunately, however, in order to succeed, this emergency operation

must chop the mind into even smaller pieces. The real world; the one known

by science, is left entirely to itself. Phenomenology deals only with the world-

for-a-human-consciousness. It will teach us a lot about how we never

distance ourselves from what we see, how we never gaze at a distant

spectacle, how we are always immersed in the world's rich and lived texture,

but, alas, this knowledge will be of no use in accounting for how things really

are, since we will never be able to escape from the narrow focus of human

intentionality. Instead of exploring the ways we can shift from standpoint to

standpoint, we will always be fixed in the human one. We will hear much talk

about the real, fleshy, pre-reflexive lived world, but this will not be enough to

cover the noise of the second ring of prison doors slamming even more

tightly shut behind us. For all its claims to overcoming the distance between

subject and object—as if this distinction were something that could be

overcome! as if it had not been devised so as not to be overcome!—

phenomenology leaves us with the most dramatic split in this whole sad

story: a world of science left entirely to itself, entirely cold, absolutely

inhuman; and a rich lived world of intentional stances entirely limited to

humans, absolutely divorced from what things are in and for themselves. A

slight pause on the way down before sliding even further in the same

direction.

Why not choose the opposite solution and forget the mind-in-a-vat

altogether? Why not let the "outside world" invade the scene, break the

glassware, spill the bubbling liquid, and turn the mind into a brain, Into a

neuronal machine sitting inside a Darwinian animal struggling for its life?

Would that not solve all the problems and reverse the fatal downward spiral?

Instead of the complex "life-world" of the phenomenologists, why not study

the adaptation of humans, as naturalists have studied all other aspects of

"life"? If science can invade everything, it surely can put an end to Descartes's

long-lasting fallacy and make the mind a wriggling and squiggling part of

nature. This would certainly please my friend the psychologist—or would it?

No, because the ingredients that make up this "nature," this hegemonic and

all-encompassing nature*, which would now include the human species, are

the

very same ones

that have constituted the spectacle of a world viewed from

inside by a brain-in-a-vat. Inhuman, reductionist, causal, law-like, certain,

objective, cold, unanimous, absolute—all these expressions do not pertain to

nature

as such,

but to nature viewed through the deforming prism of the glass

vessel!

If there is something unattainable, it is the dream of treating nature as a

homogeneous unity in order to unify the different views the sciences have of

it! This would require us to ignore too many controversies, too much history,

too much unfinished business, too many loose ends. If phenomenology

abandoned science to its destiny by limiting it to human intention, the

opposite move, studying humans as "natural phenomena," would be even

worse: it would abandon the rich and controversial human history of

science—and for what? The averaged-out orthodoxy of a few

neurophilosophers? A blind Darwinian process that would limit the mind's

activity to a struggle for survival to "fit" with a reality whose true nature

would escape us forever? No, no, we can surely do better, we can surely stop

the downward slide and retrace our steps, retaining both the history of

humans' involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences'

involvement in the making of human history.

Unfortunately, we can't do this, not yet. We are prevented from returning

to the lost crossroads and taking the other path by the dangerous bogeyman I

mentioned earlier. It is the threat of mob rule that stops us, the same threat

that made my friend's voice quake and quiver.

The Fear of Mob Rule

As I said, two fears lay behind my friend's strange question. The first one, the

fear of a mind-in-a-vat losing its connection to a world outside, has a shorter

history than the second, which stems from this truism: if reason does not

rule, then mere fo

ce will take over. So great is this threat that any and every

political expedient is used with impunity against those who are deemed to

advocate force against reason. But where does this striking opposition

between the camp of reason and the camp of force come from? It comes

from an old and venerable debate, one that probably occurs in many places

but that is staged most clearly and influentially in Plato's

Gorgias.

In this

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