Bruno Latour began as a sociologist of science. In his late twenties, after completing his doctorate at the University of Tours, he had observed endocrinological research in California as a kind of ethnologist in the laboratory of future Nobel Prize winner Roger Guillemin and came to the conclusion that truth and facts are not discovered, but fabricated. The laboratory appeared as a place where facts emerge using reputation, bureaucracy, quotations, machines, third-party funds, arguments and conflicts. The scientific publication makes the history of finding facts invisible, here facts are always the result of “logical” investigation steps.
In contrast, Latour and his colleague Stephen Woolgar made it clear how strongly social factors determine research in “Laboratory Life” in 1979 with the discovery of a substance that triggers the production of the hormone thyrotropin. They meticulously reconstructed which decisions went into the search for this substance, which paths were taken and which were not. Even in the laboratory, rhetoric is constantly being used to negotiate, even if it is not fixed, what constitutes proof, what a good test is, what the point is. From this, the conclusion was often drawn that science is no different than the bazaar, in parliament or in court. The fact that the assertion that “everything is a construction” wants to be taken seriously and that sociological research claims to say something that is true has often gone unnoticed. Latour, who in 1982 received a professorship at the renowned technical college “Ècole Nationale Supérieure des Mines”, continued his work with a book on the influence of Louis Pasteur in France and in 1993 with a fascinating study of the “Berlin key”, that invention a double-bearded object that keeps the front doors always closed at night and always open during the day. Technology reigns here between subject and object, which cannot be located on either side.
This was followed by Latour’s ever-stronger attacks on a social philosophy in which things were also ascribed the quality of actors. Society and nature, he proclaimed in 1995 in “We have never been modern”, cannot be separated, and therefore neither can pre-modern and modern. In 1998 he called for a “Parliament of Things” under ecological auspices, but without being able to explain who could speak for the Alps, the coasts and the bees as human persons with their own interests. Nevertheless, his theses found an echo in the environmental protection movement, and he himself published a great deal on climate policy and most recently even a “terrestrial manifesto”. He concluded by recalling his origins as a child of a family of winegrowers in Beaune, Burgundy, and that Europe is a province in world historical terms – which is the best thing about this continent. Don’t overdo it with modernity was Latour’s motto. He died in Paris at the age of 75.