According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the (...) critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

In the past forty years, Bruno Latour’s claim that Science Is Politics By Other Means (SIPBOM) has been the underlying creed of Science and Technology Studies (STS), most of us simply taking it for granted. In contrast, this special issue is predicated on the observation of an enduring lack of exegesis of this catchphrase so remarkable that is has caused an outcry among natural scientists, echoed in some social science quarters. If SIPBOM has been a resource for decades, by turning (...) it into a topic this special issue revisits one of the most exciting and challenging insights of contemporary thought. (shrink)