Abstract“Science Is Politics By Other Means” (SIPBOM) was coined in The Pasteurization of France, Latour’s 1984 empirical study of the birth of microbiology. Yet, it encapsulates an outstanding political theory of science that Latour has never formalized and that has remained unnoticed to this day. The theory is comprised of two dimensions. The first one is the ontological labor performed by science, that is, the laboratory production of new nonhumans. The second one is the ability of science to devise and (...) implement novel policies targeted at the new beings it produces. These “other means” are incorporated in political projects and contribute to the shaping of society. Fifteen years later, Latour published Politics of Nature ([1999] 2004), a full-blown political treatise equally devoted to the political character of science. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that it falls in the same SIPBOM paradigm as the Pasteur study. The compositionist theory it offers redefines politics as the institution of the nonhumans that make up external reality, a task that has traditionally been monopolized by Science. In this sense, “science is politics by other means” has become “politics is science by other means,” these “other means” now referring to “cosmopolitics,” that is, the due process advocated by compositionism. The first claim of the present paper is that the respective weight ascribed to politics and ontology is different in The Pasteurization of France and in Politics of Nature. The second claim is that compositionism is not as successful as Latour’s early theory to account for the politicity of science. (shrink)

The question of universalism and relativism is often taken to be a matter of critical reflexivity. This article attempts to present the question instead as a matter of practical, political, and always-situated concern. The attempt starts from the consideration of modern experimental sciences. These sciences usually serve as the stronghold for universalist claims and as such are a target of relativism. It is argued that the specificity of these sciences is not a method but a concern. To be able to (...) claim that they have not unilaterally imposed their definitions on the phenomena they study is the leading concern of experimenters and should be understood in terms of the following achievement: the creation of a very particular “rapport” that authorizes claiming that what is operationally defined “lends itself” to this correlation. Linking knowledge production with a creation of rapports entails a pluralization of sciences along with the pluralization of modes of concern associated with the rapport. However, resisting unilaterally imposed definitions is not enough, since with the coming “knowledge economy” the questions that this article raises will soon be part of a romantic past. Thus it concludes with a speculative touch, which may be a requiem, relating the creation of rapports with an ecology of practices akin to William James's always-under-construction pluriverse. (shrink)

This article is an analytic register of recent European efforts in the making of ‘autonomous’ robots to address what is imagined as Europe’s societal challenges. The paper describes how an emerging techno-epistemic network stretches across industry, science, policy and law to legitimize and enact a robotics innovation agenda. Roadmap is the main metaphor and organizing tool in working across the disciplines and sectors, and in aligning these heterogeneous actors with a machine-centric vision along a path to make way for ‘new (...) kinds’ of robots. We describe what happens as this industry-dominated project docks in a public–private partnership with pan-European institutions and a legislative initiative on robolaw. Emphasizing the co-production of robotics and European innovation politics, we observe how well-known uncertainties and scholarly debates about machine capabilities and human–machine configurations, are unexpectedly played out in legal scholarship and institutions as a controversy and a significant problem for human-centered legal frameworks. European robotics are indeed driving an increase in speculative ethics and a new-found weight of possible futures in legislative practice. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical (...) object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe. (shrink)