Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Representation as ‘Spokespersonship’: Bruno Latour's Political Theory

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13534640802159161

1460-700X

Lisa Disch,

Media, Communication, and Education

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I thank the members of the Wednesday Noon Research Group in the Department of Speech Communications at the University of Minnesota for their spirited discussion of this essay. I also thank Mark Brown, Terrell Carver, Sam Chambers, John Nelson and Michael Nordquist for their thoughtful comments on various versions, and Jerome Whitington for an inspiring edit. All translations are the author's own, unless stated otherwise. 2. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 275. 3. Bruno Latour. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.41, p.64. 4. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.148. 5. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France [1984], trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.148. 6. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (NY: WW Norton, 1988), p.33. 7. Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.37. 8. His work (like that of Isabelle Stengers) has been a veritable crusade against the modern cult of the expert which he castigates for 'providing the great political advantage of shutting down human babble with a voice from nowhere that renders political speech forever empty.' Latour, Pandora's Hope, p.140. 9. Bruno Latour, 2001, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, deuxième édition (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), p.8. 10. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.200. 11. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.206. 12. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.200, p.215. In a similar critique of the ideal of an originary power, Judith Butler has identified the pretense to self‐sufficiency is the characteristic performative whereby power which is 'established in and through… effects [that are] the dissimulated workings of power itself.' In Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p.251, n.12. 13. Simon Schaffer, 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 22 (1991), pp.174–92, (p.182). 14. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p.54. 15. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p.34. 16. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People [1960] (Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1975), p.100. 17. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.10. 18. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, p.46. 19. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 227. 20. Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, trans. Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p.61. 21. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, p. 24 22. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.70. 23. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.70. 24. Yves Gingras, 'Following Scientists Through Society? Yes, But at Arm's Length!' in Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, ed. Jed Buchwald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.131. 25. Olga Amsterdamska, 'Surely you are joking Monsieur Latour!', Science, Technology, and Human Values 15:4 (1990), pp. 495–504, (p.497). 26. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.32. 27. Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science [1993], trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.76. 28. In Reassembling the Social, Latour specifies the distinction between 'constructivism' and 'social constructivism': 'When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilizing various entities whose assemblage could fail; "social constructivism" means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is "really" built' (p.91). 29. Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation [1967] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p.215. 30. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, p.6. 31. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.64. 32. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, p.118. 33. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, p.37. 34. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.41. 35. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.64. 36. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p.39. 37. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.70. 38. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.149. 39. Bruno Latour, 'Give me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World' in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Study of Science, ed. Karin D. Knorr‐Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), p.151. 40. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.67. 41. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.68. 42. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.68. 43. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.67. 44. Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, p. 89. 45. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.67, p.265. 46. Bruno Latour, 'For David Bloor…and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor's "Anti‐Latour,"' Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 30(1999), p.126. In Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ian Hacking proposes that 'intervention' is a better way to think about what has been traditionally understood as the 'observation' of a fact. Positivist theories of science have not only misunderstood observation by conceiving it as 'reporting‐what‐one‐sees' but also exaggerated its importance in the practice of laboratory science: 'Often the experimental task, and the test of ingenuity or even greatness, is less to observe and report, than to get some bit of equipment to exhibit phenomena in a reliable way', p.170 [emphasis added]. 47. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, 'Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley' in Science as Practice and Culture, Andrew Pickering, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.349. 48. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.75. 49. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.170–71. 50. Bruno Latour, 'David', p.117. 51. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.148. 52. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.148. 53. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.145. 54. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p.34. 55. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p.34. 56. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.147, 144. 57. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.147. 58. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.126. 59. Chantal Mouffe, 'Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics' in Feminists Theorize the Political, Joan Scott and Judith Butler ed. (New York: Routledge,1992), p.372. 60. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (New York: Verso, 1996), p.40. 61. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), p.96. 62. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations, p.40. 63. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p.318, 206. Historical studies of 'whiteness' by Edmund Morgan, David Roediger, Alexander Saxton and others provide an excellent example of this dynamic, detailing how workers in the US were brought to privilege race solidarities across class differences over class interests that could have forged cross‐race coalitions. 64. In her article 'Rethinking Representation', APSR, 97:4 (2003), p. 519, political theorist Jane Mansbridge dramatizes this dilemma. She first proposes to base this difference on the distinction between 'education' and 'coercive power', the former persuading by 'arguments on the merits' and being 'by definition in the recipients' interests', and the latter being contrary to them, but immediately acknowledges that as 'what is and what is not in an individual's interests' is itself in play in political conflict, it can afford no critical leverage over it. 65. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, ch. 4. 66. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, p.123. Latour uses 'him' here because he is referring explicitly to Pasteur. 67. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, p. 123. 68. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, p. 123. 69. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.139. 70. Bruno Latour, Pasteurization, p.315. 71. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.147. 72. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, p.23. 73. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, p.24. 74. Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, (NY: Arlington House, 1969). That strategy came to fruition beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminating in the Republican take‐over of both houses of Congress in 1995. 75. See: Larry M. Bartels, 'Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind', Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005), pp. 15–31; Thomas Frank, What's the matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004). 76. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action [1983], trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p.89. 77. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.16. 78. Bruno Latour, 'Laboratory', p.155. 79. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.145. 80. Bruno Latour, 'Laboratory', p.155. 81. Bruno Latour, 'Laboratory', pp.150–51. 82. Bruno Latour, 'Laboratory', p.144. 83. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.160. 84. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.160, 196. 85. Bruno Latour, Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions, p.196. 86. Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, p. 99. 87. For an exquisite scientific example of the mechanics of displacement, see Latour, Pandora's Hope, ch. 2. 88. Bruno Latour, 'What if we Talked Politics a Little?' Contemporary Political Theory 2 (2003), p.151. 89. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.267. 90. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, p.81. 91. Matthew L. Wald, 'Controversy Dogs Inquiry on Bridge Collapse', New York Times (30 January 2008). 92. Two excellent examples of this kind of scholarship are Timothy Mitchell, 'Can the Mosquito Speak?' in Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 19–53, and Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 93. Gayatri Spivak carefully untangles representation in the sense of 'acting for' (vetreten) from representation in the sense of 'standing for' (darstellen) in order to demonstrate how political and scholarly representation are mutually implicated. See 'History' in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.248–64.