answering a question about “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”

Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay (originally 2003 lecture) “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” can be found HERE. It’s a widely cited piece and well worth reading.

Someone in the blogosphere was asking the reason why I am mentioned in the first footnote:

“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.”

To answer the question, my name is mentioned because that essay emerged from an email conversation I’d been having with Latour around that time. I felt that he was spending too much time critiquing traditional realism, and as a result he was looking to some people like a stereotypical social constructionist. And I’m not just referring to the critique of Latour during the Sokal Hoax, but also of the praise given to Latour by Richard Rorty in Vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers. I don’t have the book in front of me, but Rorty basically says: “Latour is great, because he realizes that quarks are just as socially constructed as human rights.” Which completely misses the point of Latour’s philosophy, of course. (In fact, my first intervention in grown-up philosophy dialogue was when I wrote to Rorty –I was still a graduate student– to say that he had oversimplified Latour. To Rorty’s credit, he wrote back quickly and graciously and conceded the point.)

In any case, due to that passage in Rorty and some other things, I sensed there was a real danger of Latour being reduced in Anglophone philosophy circles to the platitude that “everything is socially constructed,” and that’s why I urged him to write something in the other direction. As I recall, he needed a bit of persuasion, because in France he sometimes gets the opposite criticism– among Bourdieu’s disciples, for instance, Latour can be attacked as a reactionary realist who gives too much credit to non-human things.

As I’ve tried to show in Prince of Networks and elsewhere, Latour’s position on the realism question is a lot more complicated than that. He’s not so much an anti-realist as a relationist, which makes him not too different on that point from Whitehead. I would agree that there are some anti-realist moments in Latour of the sort that we never find in Whitehead. If you think Latour says everything is socially constructed, you’re wrong but you’re not a complete idiot, whereas if you said that about Whitehead you would be a complete idiot with not the first clue of what is going on. So admittedly, there are passages where Latour invites the charge of anti-realism. But it’s always made too hastily. In fact, Latour draws more hasty dismissals than just about anyone. I’ve seen whole polemical articles on Latour written by people who had clearly done nothing more than skimmed through a chapter looking for incriminating quotes to take out of context.