10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18893
This Crossing Boundaries stems from two events: the recent STS-Italia conference (Bologna, June 2023) and the 4S/ESOCITE conference (Cholula, December 2022). Both events dedicated a space for reflecting on Bruno Latour’s intellectual legacy, inviting some of the scholars who had the chance and the privilege to work with him. The text opens with a reflection by Madeleine Akrich on her two-decade experience working alongside Latour and on the multifaceted nature of his contributions to sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. The text continues with a contribution by Huub Dijstelbloem, who explores Latour’s magmatic thinking, emphasizing the transformative power of his ideas. Annalisa Pelizza traces two key associations in Bruno Latour’s intellectual trajectory. The first one traces back to Latour’s early engagement with the semiotics of the “École de Paris” and Greimas’ theory of enunciation, emphasizing the local context of the French semiotic debate. The second association delves into Latour’s connection with technofeminism and Donna Haraway’s material-semiotics, highlighting a global dialogue initiated in the late 1980s. Finally, Paolo Landri underlines the transformative potential of Latour’s vocabulary in the context of education, underlying the interdisciplinary connections fostered by following Latour.&nbsp;
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Drawing Bruno Together
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Crossing Boundaries
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Paolo Landri
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18893
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Drawing Bruno Together
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T/S                                                                                 CROSSING BOUNDARIES



Drawing Bruno Together

Madeleine Akrich                          Huub Dijstelbloem                              Annalisa Pelizza
Centre de Sociologie de                   Institute for Advanced Study of                University of Bologna and
l’Innovation-Mines Paris PSL              the University of Amsterdam                    University of Aarhus


                                          Paolo Landri
                                          Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
                                          CNR-IRPPS



Corresponding author                    Abstract
Annalisa Pelizza                        This Crossing Boundaries stems from two events: the recent STS-Italia con-
Department of Philosophy and            ference (Bologna, June 2023) and the 4S/ESOCITE conference (Cholula,
Communication Studies,                  December 2022). Both events dedicated a space for reflecting on Bruno La-
University of Bologna                   tour’s intellectual legacy, inviting some of the scholars who had the chance
Via Zamboni 38, 40126                   and the privilege to work with him. The text opens with a reflection by Mad-
Bologna, Italy                          eleine Akrich on her two-decade experience working alongside Latour and
   annalisa.pelizza2@unibo.it           on the multifaceted nature of his contributions to sociology, anthropology,
                                        and philosophy. The text continues with a contribution by Huub Dijstelblo-
Submitted: September 15, 2023           em, who explores Latour’s magmatic thinking, emphasizing the transfor-
Accepted: November 27, 2023             mative power of his ideas. Annalisa Pelizza traces two key associations in
                                        Bruno Latour’s intellectual trajectory. The first one traces back to Latour’s
                                        early engagement with the semiotics of the “École de Paris” and Greimas’
                                        theory of enunciation, emphasizing the local context of the French semiotic
                                        debate. The second association delves into Latour’s connection with tech-
                                        nofeminism and Donna Haraway’s material-semiotics, highlighting a glob-
                                        al dialogue initiated in the late 1980s. Finally, Paolo Landri underlines the
                                        transformative potential of Latour’s vocabulary in the context of education,
                                        underlying the interdisciplinary connections fostered by following Latour.

                                        Keywords
                                        Latour; sociology; anthropology; material-semiotics; education.




The many facets of Bruno Latour
Madeleine Akrich

  I had the privilege of working in the same research center as Bruno Latour for about 20
years. When it comes to looking back on what he brought us, this is also a disadvantage. This

TECNOSCIENZA. Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies                    © The Author(s) 2023
14(2) pp. 73-100 ISSN 2038-3460                                                  Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
DOI: 10.6092/issn.2038-346/10 893                                                www.tecnoscienza.net
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                                    74

proximity blurs points of reference, dilutes the events in the continuous fabric of a shared
daily life, and ultimately raises doubts: who was he, a sociologist, an anthropologist of sci-
ence and technology, a philosopher, to use some of the labels he gave himself? Likewise, the
subsequent evolution of his work questions about his project in retrospect: was his work on
science, then on technology, only a first step, conceptualized as such from the outset, or has it
become so as he traced his intellectual path, site after site, book after book?
   My first contact with Bruno Latour took place during my final year at the École des Mines,
when I decided to specialize in sociology. I had to draft a small research project, and wanted to
work on the restoration of works of art. He gave me access to a fascinating case, the Beaune polyp-
tych, because members of the Latour family had been on the board of the Hospices de Beaune
and thus involved in the last restoration of the polyptych in the seventies. I went to Beaune, and
was welcomed by his mother in the family home, one of the many examples of the hospitality of
Latour and his family. I interviewed his uncle who guided me in the Hospices de Beaune, in the
monument as well as in the institution. I had a glimpse of what he himself described as a bour-
geois Catholic provincial family and the confidence it gave him: he never had any doubts about
his place, even if the choice of an academic career was certainly not the most expected in his family.
   A few months later, after graduating as an engineer, I joined the Centre de Sociologie de
l’Innovation (CSI) to work on a research contract on energy technologies in developing coun-
tries. This may seem very strange, because I had no training in the social sciences, other than
three basic courses and a dissertation, but back then, a lot of things were possible.
   And this idea that many things were possible could be applied to the next ten years at the
CSI. First of all, with the exception of Lucien Karpik who had been the first director of the
CSI, all CSI members were under 40 years old. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour had a pio-
neering spirit; they shared very high ambitions, perhaps not exactly the same, but at least they
both wanted to be part or even be amongst the leaders of this new STS field.
   Surprisingly, like all CSI members, I only recently discovered how Callon and Latour’s
relationship had developed: in a long paper Callon recently published (2023a), he provides a
very interesting and moving testimony on their collaboration. Their first contacts resembled
an intellectual romance. They met for the first time in 1978 at Latour’s initiative:

     After a few minutes, we agreed on the program to be put in place: to enter the black box of scien-
     tific practices and focus on the only thing that matters: their content. […] Latour’s visit was most
     welcome. He brought with him a breath of fresh air from the Anglo-Saxon world. (Callon 2023a)

  After this first contact, many others took place, including regular lunches in a brasserie in
the Odéon district with Latour, Callon and the philosopher Michel Serres, where I suppose
they remade the world, at least the world of science and technology studies.
  Four years after their first encounter, Callon managed to secure a position for Latour at
the École des Mines, and so began an intense decade of collective work between these two
outstanding researchers.
  The intellectual momentum Callon and Latour had created through their near-secret en-
counters generated an extremely stimulating atmosphere: the world of possibilities seemed
completely open to us. Neither did we care about academic positioning within the French
75                                                                       Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

microcosm, as evidenced by the fact that temporary and permanent members of the CSI
came from a wide variety of backgrounds, engineering, history, business schools, develop-
ment studies, urban planning, etc., almost everything except sociology!
   The prior exchanges between Latour and Callon had made it possible to build a collective
project based on the solid foundations provided by each of them: inscription and actant for
Latour, translation for Callon, and then notions developed jointly such as that of spokes-
person (porte-parole). Far from being restrictive hypotheses, all these notions appeared to us
as descriptive tools allowing us to explore in new ways the making of scientific facts, tech-
nologies and beyond. We were very surprised to be perceived from the outside as a kind of
sect, rigidly dogmatic, while from the inside, we had a feeling of great freedom and openness,
manifested itself through the variety of research topics and the liveliness of our discussions.
   The general atmosphere was very joyful and collaborative. Every seminar was fascinating,
owing to the brilliant ping pong between Callon and Latour, in which we all tried to partic-
ipate: Antoine Hennion brought his particular touch to the table with his concept of me-
diation, forged in his work around music; even Karpik who was probably the only one not
partaking into the CSI Callon-Latour project certainly played a useful role with his provoca-
tive remarks and questions that he punctuated with a laugh rivaling Bruno’s famous one. As
Callon wrote in the aforementioned article, Latour liked nothing more than being challenged
on his texts before they were published: so even if Karpik and Latour were not very fond of
each other, their skirmishes could be quite productive.
   After about ten years of intense work together, things began to change. Not sure that any
of us clearly understood what was at stake. Callon’s article as well as the article by Antoine
Hennion in the special issue of Pragmata devoted to Latour (Hennion 2023) give credence
to the idea that the late Latour, the one from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, had al-
ways been there. Latour himself accredited this idea in a paper he wrote on the genesis of
the Inquiry (Latour 2013). But the very fact that they all need to make this point may also
suggest that it was not so clear. As Hennion put it, Latour “realized” this project, in the dou-
ble meaning of the verb “réaliser” in French: making something real and becoming aware of
something. The first time he presented his “regimes of enunciation”, which later became his
“modes of existence”, nobody really understood what he wanted to do.
   It also marked a break in his relationships with the CSI collective. Up to that point, I believe
we had all been working together, developing our own analyses, borrowing from others and
vice-versa. From then on, Bruno became preoccupied with his own work and was somewhat
frustrated by CSI’s lack of enthusiasm for filling in the many boxes of his model, which ironi-
cally illustrates the limitations of the CSI – sect model. He was also looking for deserved recog-
nition for his work, and while the École des Mines was a place of great academic freedom, it was
not really a place where one could hope for such recognition as a philosopher or a sociologist.
   Latour’s contribution to the life of the CSI and beyond has been immense. If I try to char-
acterize the specificity of this contribution, I would say that there are four facets of his person-
ality that were decisive: Latour was a philosopher, a writer, a creative thinker – and a teacher,
and it was the constant intermingling of these four aspects that produced the most innovative
effects. None of this would have been possible without the tremendous vital energy that in-
habited him, pushing him ever further into the exploration of the possible.
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                              76

   That he is a philosopher may seem obvious today. It was less so during his time at CSI: he
often had trouble introducing himself, and would use the label of sociologist or anthropol-
ogist, but always half-heartedly. This wasn’t a problem for the CSI, since we didn’t need a
well-defined disciplinary affiliation. In a recent presentation, Callon (2023b) develops the
idea that Latour, who chose to practice “field philosophy” or empirical philosophy, had long
considered himself an amateur philosopher, and that he was only able to assume the status of
philosopher when he was convinced by the confrontation to certain philosophical books and
philosophers, such as Isabelle Stengers, that he was indeed a professional philosopher.
   In retrospect, it seems to me that this identity as a philosopher, as vague as it may have
seemed, played an important role in his way of being and acting, and had an impact on the
collective that we formed. One notable feature was his ability to detect researchers from any
disciplinary background to discuss with and his capacity to formulate questions making a
dialogue possible. He brought a whole intellectual world to the CSI – when he joined the
CSI, he had already quite an extensive international network from which we benefited. He
was also so self-confident that he could persuade anyone to come and discuss with him and
us: anthropologists, historians, art historians, ethologists, prehistorians, researchers in man-
agement science, mathematicians and so on.
   His vocation as a teacher was palpable in the passion he put in supervising the CSI doctoral
students, as well as in his work teaching students at the École des Mines and later at Sciences
Po Paris. But what undoubtedly sets him apart is his tireless drive to innovate in this area,
somehow stemming from a cross-fertilization between the teacher and the creative thinker.
Rather than transmitting unchanging knowledge, his aim was to lead students towards new
experiences. As he used to tell his doctoral students, writing is the work by which thought
emerges, and it’s a work that requires practice: just as he spent his days blackening his note-
books with illegible fly-paws – he was doing his scales, he used to say – he encouraged stu-
dents to practice by proposing all kinds of exercises. It was this same determination to develop
new forms of teaching that led him to launch a major pedagogical program, FORCCAST,
dedicated to exploring contemporary controversies – in a variety of pedagogical forms, from
dossiers to websites, theatrical performances and simulations – which has become a flagship
exercise from high school to many higher education sites in France and abroad.
   I have just given a few examples in the field of pedagogy, but creativity was Latour’s way of
being: each time, he imagined innovative ways of bringing together fields or forms of action
that were usually separate. He seemed to find some sort of youthful jubilation in this kind of
experimentation. He devised theatrical forms for academic events, proposed a highly unusual
book format with Paris Ville Invisible, embarked on the organization of exhibitions, con-
ceived An Inquiry into Modes of Existence as both a classic book and a collective web platform,
wrote plays, set up a master’s degree in experimental political arts etc. He was a daring man,
and no form of experimentation frightened him.
   His ethos as a philosopher, his vocation as a teacher, his creativity – all these elements of his per-
sonality are reflected in his writings. Because he never ceased experimenting in his books with a va-
riety of forms of writing according to each intellectual project, and was never content to mold him-
self into the conventional formats of academic writing, I think he can also be considered as a writer.
   The first aspect that stands out is the number and variety of his productions. Many of his
77                                                                          Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

early books are based on a “field work” or an archive work he carried out: Laboratory Life, The
Pasteurization of France, The Making of Law – An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat, Aramis
or the Love of Technology are examples for this. However, even if very empirical, these books
are also deeply analytical in their organization. After a while, he began to write books where
the argument was clearly the organizing principle, where the idea is somehow to propose a
way of describing and seeing that shifts our perception of the world we live in, of modernity
and of the role of science in our societies. Science in action, We have never been modern, On
the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, belong to this series which culminates in the Inquiry into
Modes of Existence, a book that fully assumes its status as a philosophical work. More recently,
he wrote a whole series of books aimed at the educated general public in order to raise aware-
ness on the ecological crisis and again to shift our perception of what it is to inhabit the Earth.
   But this simple classification should not obscure the fact that each book has its own par-
ticular physiognomy, linked to the author’s search for an adequate form to convey the under-
lying project. The intention of many of his books is to share an experience with the reader:
not to show an external reality, but to embark the reader on a journey that is both intellectual
and sensitive, at the same time producing a way of apprehending the outside world.
   The reader is constantly present as a central figure in his writing, in a variety of ways: in
some cases as in Aramis, s/he is personified in a narrative by a fictional being whose fluid
contours enable the author-investigator to communicate with a reader-investigator. In other
cases, the reader is directly addressed by a “you” spoken by the author’s “I”, and engaged in
an imagined dialogue. Elsewhere, the use of “on” – this strange French pronoun that can be
indefinite or personal, designate an individual or human beings in their generality, include or
exclude the speaker – leaves the reader free to choose his or her position, and even allows him
or her to slide from one position to another. A more in-depth political-semiotic analysis of
the use of pronouns in Latour’s books would undoubtedly be necessary, and would shed light
on the way in which his philosophical background, his vocation as a teacher and his creativity
were in some way linked in the writing formats he has adopted.
   In any case, Latour’s formal work was intended to make his books accessible to a wider
audience than that of his peers; he was always in search of a form of argumentative clarity:
beyond his intellectual contributions, it seems to me that he is inviting STS to (re)make this
concern for the reader – which can of course take other forms – their own.


References

Callon, Michel (2023a, February 13) Travailler au quotidien avec Bruno Latour. AOC. Available at:
   https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/02/12/travailler-au-quotidien-avec-bruno-latour-1-2/ (retrieved
   on December 6, 2023).
Callon, Michel (2023b, October 23) La vocation tardive d’un philosophe qui se croyait amateur, in “Une
   journée avec Bruno Latour” [Conference], Paris, École des Mines.
Hennion, Antoine (2023) Introduction, in “Pragmata”, 6, pp. 303-340.
Latour, Bruno (2013) Biography of an inquiry: On a book about modes of existence, in “Social Studies of
   Science”, 43(2), pp. 287-301.
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                                  78

Magma for the Mind
Huub Dijstelbloem


1. Discovering Latour

  Magma. If there is one word that expresses how Latour’s work entered my life and affected my
thoughts, reshuffled them, and changed my worldview, it must be this term. As Tommaso Ven-
turini (2009) explains in Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network theory:

     As the rock in magma, the social in controversies is both liquid and solid at the same time.
     But there’s more to this metaphor: in magma solid and liquid states exist in a ceaseless
     mutual transformation; while, at the margins of the flow, the lava cools down and crystal-
     lizes, some other solid rock touched by the heat of the flow melts and becomes part of the
     stream. The same fluctuation between different states of solidity can be observed in con-
     troversies. Through this dynamic the social is unremittingly constructed, deconstructed
     and reconstructed. This is the social in action and that’s why we have no other choice than
     diving in magma. (Venturini 2009, 258)

  The mutual interaction and transformation of magma and rocks resembles the famous
description of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) on the orchid and the wasp in A Thousand Pla-
teaus. According to them:

     The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritori-
     alizes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s
     reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and
     orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10)

   It will come as no surprise that Latour was sympathetic to the suggestion to rename ac-
tor-network theory as actant-rhizome ontology (Latour 1999, 19). The magma metaphor is
significant in many ways, one of which is that it foreshadows Latour’s later interest in ques-
tions of climate, earth, and critical zones. As I will explain in more detail later, Latour’s mag-
matic thinking was not without complications. But if we follow the magma metaphor for
now, to me discovering Latour was like jumping into a volcano and being overwhelmed by
the magma under the surface of the earth. Everything that I thought was solid and certain
melted. Meanwhile, I had the feeling my most daring, fluid, adventurous, speculative, and
amorphous thoughts solidified and took shape.
   When the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant interviewed me in 2016 about what motivates
me in my research, the headline read, “It still helps when I ask myself: what would Latour
do?” That holds still true. In the interview I explained that in the early nineties I was fed up
with studying philosophy. I had all kinds of jobs, as a film critic, as a radio talk-show guest,
even as a band manager. But what brought me back to my studies was the discovery of Sci-
79                                                                    Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

ence and Technology Studies, STS. The relationship between the Dutch STS community
and international STS has always been very productive, as has the relationship between La-
tour and Dutch scholars. Since the 1980s, there have been close contacts and annual meetings
between the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology, and Modern
Culture (WTMC) and the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at the École Nation-
ale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (ENSMP), and scholars such as Wiebe Bijker, Annemarie
Mol, and Gerard de Vries, and later Noortje Marres and Peter-Paul Verbeek have promoted
the development of STS in the Netherlands and exchanges with Latour and his colleagues.
When asked about the fertile ground that the Dutch delta seems to offer for this kind of re-
search, Latour once remarked that this should not come as a surprise, since the whole of the
Netherlands, with its dikes and water boards, is socially constructed.
   I took a course in science journalism at the University of Amsterdam’s STS department.
One day a teacher showed a video, he must have recorded it himself from television, a broad-
cast of the VPRO program Noorderlicht about the French philosopher Bruno Latour. It
knocked my socks off. Latour was being interviewed at the Musée de Minéralogie, explaining
that a crystal in a museum has hardly anything to do with nature. I thought it was phenome-
nal, and I still think it is, perhaps even more so today. The immediate effect of that one vide-
otape was: I must study under his supervision. I took part in the Erasmus exchange program
and enrolled at the École des Mines. But would they let me in? E-mail was just beginning
to be used among students, so instead of writing him, I decided to take the train to Paris.
I went to the reception of the École des Mines to ask for an appointment. But because of
my terrible French, the receptionist thought I had an appointment with him. While I was
waiting, Latour, two meters tall and impressive, suddenly approached me: “Did we have an
appointment?” No, we did not, but he listened to me and said: “Send me a proposal”. Half a
year later I was able to go there for six months on an Erasmus scholarship.
   My time there coincided with the so-called “science wars”: the heated discussion about the
presumed relativism of Science and Technology Studies fueled by the publication of Alan
Sokal’s (1996) hoax in Social Text and David Bloor’s (1999) attack on Latour’s program with
an article titled “Anti-Latour”. Sokal, a physicist, had written a nonsensical article based on
supposed parallels between physics and postmodern thought, and peppered it with quotes
from famous postmodern authors. By publishing his hoax, and passing the peer review exam,
Sokal aimed to demonstrate that the quality standards of academic journals, which welcome
publications in the postmodernist genre, do not meet the requirements of academic rigor.
He also accused Latour of being complicit in relativism – and, according to Latour, of being
French – by being unclear about his ontological and epistemological claims. The bottle of
wine from the family estate that Latour later handed to Sokal to open the peace negotiations
that could end the Science Wars was not subjected to a reality check by the physicist, afraid
as he was of being poisoned. Independently of this, David Bloor, a sociologist of science,
also accused Latour of going a step too far. It was not the first struggle between STS and the
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, SSK. The so-called Strong Program, advocated by Bloor
and others, argued that both historically proven “true” and “false” scientific theories should
be treated in the same way to understand their significance. This premise was christened the
“principle of symmetry”. In One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                     80

the Non-Modern World, Latour (1992) argued that this principle should be extended because
it was still captured by a modernist bias and a modernist distinction between subjects and
objects. Therefore, Latour introduced a generalized principle of symmetry that should ap-
ply equally to humans and nonhumans. According to Bloor, this generalized principle was a
bridge too far. By attacking this flattened ontology, he undermined virtually the entire meth-
odological program of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation. “The ship of CSI is sinking”
Latour declared with much irony when his response to Bloor was discussed in a meeting. As
we all know: instead of sinking to the bottom of the sea, the ship traveled around the world.
Moreover, in the following decades, marked by a growing awareness of global warming and
an intensification of the relationships between people, technology and knowledge, such as
artificial intelligence, the world became more and more Latourian.


2. Working with Latour’s work

   Interpreters of Latour are already grappling with the inevitable intellectual-historical ques-
tion of whether there is a strong continuity in his work or whether there are certain breaks
in the development of his oeuvre. On the one hand, if we stick to his books, it can be argued
that his work developed out of a strong engagement with science and technology studies in
Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar), Science in Action (1987), The Pasteurization of
France (1993a) and Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996) to a broader political theory
perspective in We Have Never been Modern (1993b), Politics of Nature (2004) and the cata-
logue of the exhibition with the same name Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
(2005, with Peter Weibel) to a philosophy of Gaia, the climate regime and the politics of the
earth exemplified with Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime (2017), Down
to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime (2018) and the volume, again with Peter Weibel,
Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (2020). This development coin-
cided with his rising fame and the increased interest of scholars from other disciplines. On
the other hand, it is undeniable that Latour’s ontological interest shows a strong continuity
and that there is a soft but steady building, strengthening, deepening, and broadening in his
work from part two of The Pasteurization of France (1993a), “Irreductions”, to An Inquiry
into Modes of Existence (2013). At first glance, it might seem that there is a tension between
descriptions in terms of networks, which relate everything to everything else and cut across
different social, technical and political domains, and modes of existence, which seem to imply
distinguished spheres. What these approaches have in common is a focus on becoming, on
the emergent features of associations through which networks give rise to particular modes
of being. As such, networks can crystallize in specific forms, shapes, modes. Notwithstanding
this continuity, the intensity of global warming and climate change, and the harshness of
global inequality, have left an unmistakable mark on his later work.
   In my own work, I have tried to combine science and technology studies with political
theory, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of science. Since I am interested in how
states, power, knowledge, and technology develop and interact, I found an interesting field of
research in the overlapping disciplines of international relations, security studies, and border
81                                                                       Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

and migration studies. The question of what borders are and how they are created proved to
be a very productive one, linking questions of state formation, sovereignty, and citizenship
with research on infrastructure, geography, politics, mobility, and security.
   I have used Latour’s work I think in almost all my publications, but most profoundly in
the book Borders as Infrastructure (2021). In that book I aimed to develop a morphological
approach to understand borders. This approach means I attend to the shape of concepts and
ideas, the form they take, technically and materially, when they are made to travel and con-
nect. Meanwhile, I elaborate on Latour’s analysis of tensions and frictions, the way connec-
tions between humans and nonhumans, between politics, technology and knowledge and na-
ture are made and unmade. Drawing on Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s On Justification (2006),
I introduced the concept of “infrastructural compromises” to explain the combinations of
different technopolitical regimes, such as economic and ecological considerations in the de-
velopment of wildlife crossings or, in this specific field, the development of “humanitarian
borders” in which security and humanitarian imperatives are combined.
   Attending to the study of borders also implies a methodological perspective and this is where
the idea of magma returns. Rather than focusing on the two outer poles, two or more countries
in this case, and on how a border cuts through them, demarcates and divides them, I want to
start “in medias res”, seeing borders as entities that generate territories and categories, such as
those who can and cannot enter a state. In this sense, I understand borders as a boundary con-
cept, but in a very material and morphological way. Like magma, they have an effect on what
encounters them, and they are transformed as a result of all the traffic that does and does not
take place. Meanwhile, as I developed this perspective by working closely with colleagues in in-
ternational relations, migration, and security studies, with whom I shared the goal of advancing
STS concepts and approaches, I realized that the relationship between ontology and political
theory should be made more explicit. The violence as expressed in Europe’s border politics, the
geopolitical positioning of the EU, and the colonial roots of many international infrastructures
require a more intense engagement with political theory. But what kind of political theory?


3. Latour and Europe: everything may be allied to everything else

   Working with Latour’s theories means trying to understand his thoughts, making them
your own, applying them, modifying them, and at a certain point also questioning them.
These questions concern in particular Latour’s discussion of “Europe”. I think this discus-
sion is instructive, because it shows how Latours thinking can develop in interesting ways and
inspire scholars in different field – international relations, political theory, geography, migra-
tion studies, security studies. Witness the impact he had on the work of Andrew Barry (2001),
Marieke de Goede (2018), Timothy Mitchell (2011), Mark Salter (2015; 2016) and William
Walters (2016; 2017), and on historians of technology interested in international relations
such as Paul Edwards (2013) and Gabrielle Hecht (2011) – and vice versa. It is also instructive
because of the manifest complications: when it comes to Europe and his discussion of geopol-
itics, Latour’s work was still “under construction”, looking for its ultimate direction.
   Latour tried to unravel the relationship between the earth, territory, sovereignty, and ju-
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                       82

risdiction and to re-imagine Europe in a time of climate change. Judging him by his own
standards, I think it took him a while to find the right settlement. It is of course impossible to
summarize Latour’s philosophy in one sentence, but if there is one motto that captures most
of his work, I think it is this one from Irreductions:

     Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else,
     everything may be allied to everything else. (Latour 1993a, 163)

   In the case of “Europe”, he struggled with this (see Latour 2020; 2021; 2022). He aimed
at connecting a geological political philosophy interested in the earth, the soil, the terrain,
and the resources below the surface to a geographical political theory engaged with authority,
power, territory, and borders. That is an intriguing thought. The idea behind the creation of
the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) after World War II in 1951 was that if we
link the resources and raw materials that are underground – coal and steel – to the political
order that connects above ground – sovereign but highly dependent nation-states – a lasting
peace might emerge or at least an immediate eruption of intense conflict could be avoided.
French Foreign Minister and long-term builder of post-war Europe Robert Schuman once
declared he aimed to “make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. What
France and Germany had failed to achieve several times above ground had to be established by
a route underground. The ECSC became a blueprint for the supranational and institutional
structure of the European Community and the later European Union.
   The basic idea that there is a relationship between the political economy of raw materials,
resources and commodities, on the one hand, and the development of political systems and
state forms, on the other, is fundamental in Timothy Mitchell’s work, especially his Carbon
Democracy (2011). Mitchell shows that the monopolistic power relationship over oil, wells
and refineries in the Arab world and the Middle East produces a certain technological and
economic infrastructure that relates extremely poorly to democracy and is better suited to
autocratic and authoritarian regimes. That line of thinking was inspired by Latour’s meth-
odological principle of symmetry between politics and technology and, conversely, inspired
Latour’s thinking on international relations. At the same time, Latour never delved into in-
ternational relations, political economy, and the world of commodities or the infrastructural
history of Europe as much as he did into the Salk laboratory, the scientist Louis Pasteur, the
transport system Aramis, or the infrastructure of Paris.
   So how did Latour try to – using his own terminology – unscrew the big European Levi-
athan? When he discussed a possible European constitution or considered Europe’s geopo-
litical role, one of the complications of Latour’s analysis is that he does not seem to make a
distinction – or deliberately refused to do so – between Europe as a continent and Europe as a
political entity. On the one hand he studied the relation between sovereignty, jurisdiction, and
territory by exploring the works of the conservative and controversial thinker Carl Schmitt
(Latour 2021) and political philosopher Eric Voegelin (Latour 2017, Lecture Six). On the
other hand, he aimed at exploring Europe’s position confronted with the climate regime, in-
ternational migration, and nationalist and populist threats. In a Guest Editorial for the Com-
mon Market Law Review entitled “Europe is a soil – not a machine”, Latour (2020) wrote:
83                                                                               Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

      Fortunately, Europe as a thing, as a material reality, as a soil, possesses the right size and the
      right history for this landing, away from the two abstractions of globalization, on the one
      hand, and a return to the imaginary protection of isolated nation States, on the other. If so
      many people dream of their Heimat, it might be a good moment to reclaim Europe as our
      Heimat. (Latour 2020, 2-3)

  And in “Is Europe’s soil changing beneath our feet?” from 2022 he wrote:

      I am interested in Europe not only as an institution, but also as Europe as a territory, as a
      soil, as a turf, as a land, or, to borrow the German expression, as Heimat, with all the diffi-
      culties of that term. (Latour 2022)

   Soil, Heimat, land? What happened to “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can
be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else”? Although Latour was
of course far too knowledgeable to use these words in a naïve sense, and redefined them to suit his
purposes, he nevertheless made firm but also controversial statements about Europe. He had to
navigate between the Scylla of land-related politics and the Charybdis of a Eurocentric worldview.
But he found a way out, or, to put it less disrespectfully, he created the famous Latourian middle
position again. Latour explained he was interested in questions of “attachment” and aimed to
explore notions of land, to see “Europe as a thing, as a material reality” (2020, 2). In his last book
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (2022), written together with Nikolaj Schultz,
in one of the lemmas Europe pops up again. He describes Europe as a “kind of experimentation”,
a test lab – a “thing” – that relates the inside to the outside. With the notion of “Thing” he returns
to the etymology explained in Making Things Public (2005), in which a “Ding” is not just a ma-
terial object that is politicized, but an issue, a matter of concern that becomes a matter of politics
and gathers an emergent public that is not confined to state borders or sociological classifications.
In this way, he links the physical and geographical properties of Europe as land with the political
issues of inclusion and exclusion, and of attachment in times of climate change. Finally, Europe
seems to have landed. Not on land, it seems, but in the overarching atmosphere of the climate
regime. In the end, he did arrive at the conclusion that no soil can show us the way. Just as Latour
made his theory about the new climate regime and about Gaia “land” with the notion of the “crit-
ical zone”, in the end Latour found a way to express his attachment to Europe with a less histori-
cally affected notion than Heimat and soil. At the end of the day, Latour replaces one discussion
with another and renders the initial debate obsolete by introducing his own conceptualization of
an issue. And that, in a nutshell, is the main didactic lesson I hope to take from Latour.


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Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                             84

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Geo-politics of the Global- and Local-plus: Latour’s Associa-
tions with Semiotics and Technofeminism1
Annalisa Pelizza


1. Introduction


     There, I’ve finished. Now, if you wish, it’s your turn to present yourself, tell us a little about
     where you would like to land and with whom you agree to share a dwelling place. (Latour 2018)

   Since the passing away of Bruno Latour in October 2022, several contributions in memori-
am have tried to recall personal memories, academic events, lines of thought and the provoc-
ative style that characterized his writings. In no way is this contribution different in its effort
to address the dilemma of choosing some aspects of Latour’s work. And yet it might set itself
apart thanks to its focus on two aspects – he would say “associations” – that might not be the
most representative, but the most geo-politically (the dash makes all the difference, as Latour
taught us) antithetical: one is local, the other one has marked the global development of our
discipline. Taken together, they constitute my answer to the invitation in the quotation above.
   The first association, with the semiotics of the “École de Paris” and Greimas’ theory of
enunciation, goes back to Latour’s early writings in the late 1970s and 1980s. It is local in
that it flourished in the neighboring context of the French semiotic debate of those years,
characterized by a reflection on textuality and enunciation as the act mediating between an
abstract linguistic system (langue) and discursive acts of actualization (parole). The second as-
sociation, with technofeminism and especially Donna Haraway’s material-semiotics, reveals a
dialogue across the Atlantic initiated in the late 1980s. It is global in that Haraway and Latour
drew on different philosophical genealogies, political goals and citation cultures. Reaching
overlapping concerns and akin theorizations in the 1990s and 2000s required to align sever-
al movements of translation. While this short contribution does not aim to reconstruct the
whole alignment process, it stresses the key role of textuality in the process.
   Before proceeding, a caveat. In no way do the expressions “local” and “global” imply a tran-
sition from provincialism to globalism, as if the association with French semiotics linearly
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                          86

evolved into more international associations. Leaving alone the truism that “North Ameri-
can” does not per se imply “global”, these expressions rather follow Latour’s own reflection
on the end of modernization. After the Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Latour 2013), La-
tour’s oeuvres have tried to move the compass of the public discourse to overcome the local
vs. global modernist dichotomy, to embrace the terrestrial. In Down to Earth (2018) he voiced
the need to abandon the local vs. global binary distinction brough about by modernization
and to urgently embrace a political trajectory that leads toward the Earth. He posited two
specular understandings of the global and the local as “plus” and “minus”. Just as globaliza-
tion used to be “plus” – oriented to discovery, cosmopolitanism and standardization – and
turned “minus” – characterized by insecurity, domination and extractivism, so the local-mi-
nus of return to the past, resurrected traditions and nostalgia could leave room to a sense of
belonging and a hospital, open and inclusive dwelling place.
   There is no doubt that the two associations discussed in this essay are both “plus”. The
first one is less internationally explored, anchored as it is on a debate that has struggled to
reach English-speaking journals; and still, it explains much of Latour’s peculiar “flat” on-
tology while expanding in several directions. The second association is more internationally
renowned, having been accompanied by public debates and attempts at mutual recognition
between to science studies stars, and having marked important moments of alignment for the
STS community dispersed in different locales. Both have constituted associations in which
mediators have far exceeded intermediaries: the outcome could not be predicted from the
input. As a result of these associations, STS have hit the ground in new territories, entan-
glements and overtures. What follows tries to briefly describe the two associations, and their
ongoing implications for the STS field.
   In line with STS’s attention to multiplicity, this essay resorts to texts, conference proceed-
ings, and conversations with witnesses, as well as to personal memories of encounters with
Latour. While such a movement of subjectification is not usually apt to the folds of a scientif-
ic journals, the readers will hopefully exert mercy in the case of a short contribution written
in memoriam of a scholar who has revealed the social nature of scientific objectivity2.


2. Association #1: With semiotics and the theory of enunciation

  I have encountered Bruno Latour when I was a PhD student at the University of Milan Bi-
cocca. At that time, I was torn between an influent male supervisor in sociology and my back-
ground training in semiotics at the school of Umberto Eco. The classic earthenware among
metal pots. In my distressed attempt to conduct a meaningful PhD research in the sociology of
internet cultures using the semiotic analytical toolkit, I read a book that in the title claimed to be
oriented to sociologists and at the same time moved arguments familiar to semioticians, such as
that “the text is the social scientist’s lab”. With this expression, in Reassembling the Social, Bruno
Latour (2005a) meant two things, in my early understanding. First, that testing the consistency
of a text is a way for sociologists to assess the truth value of their research, as much as laboratory
experiments assess the truth value of scientists’ research. Second, that “texts” where not only
those I had learned to analyze as part of my semiotic training. Texts were something broader.
87                                                                       Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

   Texts were the outcomes of enunciation (utterance, énoncé), but what if “enunciation” was
to be understood in the broader meaning of enactment, practice, translation that brings some-
thing into existence? Then what is regarded as “text” could be made of many materialities. The
empowering consequence for that torn PhD student was that, as she started thinking at enact-
ments as “enunciation”, then practices, artefacts, interfaces, databases suddenly appeared as po-
tential “texts” she could link together in flat, heterogeneous networks. Thanks, Bruno, for hav-
ing liberated that PhD student from the Scylla and Charybdis of semioticians and sociologists!3
   In other words, I had just discovered the semiotic roots of Bruno Latour’s metaphysics.
What he, together with Madeline Akrich, Michell Callon, John Law, Antoine Hennion
and others named “translation”, “delegation”, “displacement” or “shifting” was in fact what
Greimas’ theory of enunciation called “débrayage”: the jump from the I/here/now of the
enunciation to a different subject/space/time of the utterance. With the major difference
that in actor-network theory the jump could take place across different materialities. Years
later, Maria Giulia Dondero would summarize my early discovery with a sharp expression:
“a movement from uttered enunciation to practical enunciation” (Dondero 2018, 22, my
translation). With this, she meant the shift from the discursive marks of enunciation (the I/
here/now of the enunciator as simulacrum) to enunciation as an actualized interaction in
presence, mediated by diverse materialities and artifacts.
   It is this semiotic genealogy focused on the mechanisms of textuality that, I suggest, con-
tributes to the exotism that is often attributed to Latour’s writing style. John Searle once
famously argued that Latour’s “extreme social constructivist” position was seriously flawed
on several points, and had inadvertently comical results (Searle 2009). This alleged comicality
can only be understood in light of a theory of practical enunciation, where mediation can be
exerted by anyone or anything endowed with agency.
   Latour’s intuition to export the mechanisms of textuality beyond text narrowly under-
stood was crucial for STS, in that it allowed accounting for material affordances (“scripts”
in Akrich and Latour 1992) without falling into technological determinism. This intuition
was indebted to the above-mentioned difference between Latour’s and Greimas’ understand-
ing of enunciation. While the latter postulated the “nesting” of the utterance in the act of
enunciation, Latour borrowed a “flat” pragmatist ontology. As Dondero (2018) has pointed
out, such a flat conceptualization of enunciation differs from Greimas’ model, characterized
by an “original rupture, a fall marking the passage between enunciation and utterance” (p.
38, my translation). Differently, as Paolucci (2020) has remarked, Latour’s translation draws
on Peirce’s illimited semiosis made of chains of interpretants lying on the same ontological
level. It is this flatness that allows following translation across different materialities. Or more
precisely: every outcome of a step of translation can be deemed a text, be it materialized in
an oral statement, a hotel key, a road bump, a car seatbelt, or a spreadsheet counting scallops.
   Although usually overlooked, Latour’s early association with semiotics and the theory
of enunciation has steered STS’ “rhetorical turn” after Kuhn (Sismondo 2010) in specific
ways, constituting one of the field’s multiple genealogies. An example is provided by two
foundational STS conceptualizations like situatedness and multiplicity. The first concept was
introduced by STS feminist authors like Haraway (1988) and Suchman (1987) to indicate
the methodological and political need to avoid detached perspectives. The second concept
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                                 88

achieved wide recognition as one of the STS tenets with Annemarie Mol’s “body multiple”
(2002). As we will see below in the case of technofeminism, these authors had different gene-
alogies than Latour’s. And yet his attention to the mechanisms of textuality might have been
crucial to ground his sensitivity on situatedness and multiplicity.
  As Fontanille writing about Latour has pointed out:

     Enunciation does not know the generic singular: it is declined only in the specific singular,
     on a case-by-case basis, or, in general, in the plural. There are therefore as many existences as
     there are possible sendings, effective enunciations. (Fontanille 2017)

  The comparison of the “specific singular”, the case-by-case actualization prompted by
enunciation with Haraway’s and Suchman’s call for situatedness is almost inevitable. STS’
methodological humility might be indebted to feminist skepticism towards god’s visions,
but also, through a different genealogy, to the theory of enunciation. Similarly, the reference
to the “many existences” enabled by multiple enunciations resounds with Annemarie Mol’s
multiple enactments of body parts and illnesses. For Latour, situatedness and multiplicity
had an alternative genealogy in the theory of enunciation, and still these concepts feature
among STS tenets. It was probably this genealogy that in Reassembling the Social brought
him to state that: “semiotics does not survive sea travels. Attention to text qua text remains a
continental obsession” (2005a, 122).


3. Association #2: With technofeminism and material-semiotics
   This citation brings about the second association that for years has literally taken place across
the Atlantic: the one with technofeminism and Donna Haraway’s material-semiotics. While
drawing on different philosophical genealogies, political goals and citation cultures, over the
years this association came to address overlapping concerns about inter-species relations and
akin theorizations about the need to move away from the representational paradigm. While
it is not among the goals of this short contribution to map theoretical and methodological
overlaps between the two scholars, I suggest that a common interest in the performative role
of texts could have grounded this association by aligning several movements of translation.
   Despite his association with textual mechanisms and the theory of enunciation, Latour
was imprecise – or provocative – in stating that semiotics does not survive sea travels. The
framing of “material-semiotics” was introduced in late 1980s by Donna Haraway and others
in feminist STS to account for the enactment of objects and subjects of knowing. Latour’s
provocative remark might however go hand in hand with Haraway’s claim of her distinct
genealogy in women’s science studies. As Haraway has clarified in an interview with Lykke,
Markussen and Olesen in Aarhus:

     People like Susan Leigh Star, and Bruno Latour, and Andy Pickering, and I, and many
     others, we read each other. So, we end up being both deliberately and unconsciously in
     conversation. But this conversation and reading of each other’s texts do not refer to a kind
89                                                                            Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

     of shared origin story or genealogy. I have a very different genealogy in science studies than,
     say, Andy Pickering or Bruno Latour do. People like Susan Leigh Star and I share more of a
     genealogy in science studies that roots it, for example, in the women’s health movement and
     in technoscientific issues, related to women’s labor in the office or to Lucy Suchman’s work.
     (Lykke, Markussen and Olesen 2000, 58)

  This genealogical difference was accompanied by a different weight given to political issues,
according to Haraway:

     The asymmetry is a historical, structural problem. It is almost impossible for folks in those
     locations [i.e., like Latour] to get it, and feminist technoscience work always feels like trou-
     ble, like “now you are getting political again”. (Lykke, Markussen and Olesen 2000, 60)

  For Latour, the political distance between them was more a matter of conflict and scale. In a
2005 chapter written for a book in homage of Donna but then rejected by the editor (Latour
2005b)4, Latour staged a dialogue between the two of them at the margin of a conference.
The dialogue aimed to figure out what divides them and what brings them closer. In Latour’s
own interpretation, what divides them is Haraway’s need to see the big picture by adopting
a post-Marxian critical approach, while Latour is depicted as a late Habermasian (by himself,
note the self-irony!). On the other hand, what brings them close is the acknowledgement that
science studies are in the middle of a difficult search for political relevance. They diverge on
the methods (conflict and big picture on one side, assemblies and details on the other), but
agree on the goal of changing irreversible power relations.
  Whatever the interpretation, diversity in genealogies and political goals was reinforced by
different citation cultures. Facing Latour’s conservative citation style, Haraway used to point
out an asymmetry in reciprocal acknowledgement:

     So after I was already doing, what I now call feminist techno-science studies, I read people
     like, for example, Bruno Latour. So Latour and other authors, which figure prominently in
     the canonized version of the history of STS, were not the origin in my story; they came after
     other events. And they do not get this! That there is a whole other serious genealogy of tech-
     noscience studies. So I remain irritated! (Laughter) Because we do know their genealogies,
     very well. And they do not know ours, even though they exist in writing. (Lykke, Markussen
     and Olesen 2000, 59)

  Despite these distances, eventually Haraway’s and Latour’s works converged on a more-
than-human, terrestrial, non-representational research agenda. A shared understanding in
the performative agency of texts could have grounded this association. For Haraway, texts are
never innocent, but performative, in a similar way as for Latour texts can act as litmus tests
of truth value. In the same interview with Nina Lykke and others in Aarhus, Haraway recalls
that texts are never only texts, but rhetorical devices and political tools (Lykke, Markussen
and Olesen 2000). As a matter of fact, Haraway recurred to semiotics in the same period as
Akrich and Latour (1992) formalized their semiotic genealogy. In her 1992 article The Prom-
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                      90

ises of Monsters, she used the semiotic square as a sort of divertissement, in her own words
“an artificial device that generates meanings very noisily” (Haraway 1992, 304). It was a seri-
ous joke, but it also shows the closeness of Haraway and Latour in taking the text seriously,
acknowledging their performativity and addressing prejudices against texts as mere fiction.
   In that same 2000 interview Haraway reclaims the performativity of her texts (“Writing
does things”, p. 53), that are nevertheless literary texts. While transgressing the boundaries be-
tween theory and literature is a long-term feminist practice, the same ambivalence of texts was
advocated by Latour, according to whom texts are the outcome of translation across different
materialities. Latour’s imaginary dialogue with Haraway above mentioned (Latour 2005b) is
in itself a literary and political text paying tribute to their association. The work of alignment
of their contributions in the STS field – I suggest – may have well passed through a common
interest in the mechanisms of textuality, and texts themselves!
   Eventually, Haraway acknowledged that Latour took on some insights from technofemi-
nism. Indeed, while traces of Latour’s opening to technofeminism are scattered in his early
works, they can be more systematically found since 1999, with the dedication of Pandora’s
Hope “To Shirley Strum, Donna Haraway, Steve Glickman, and their baboons, cyborgs, and
hyenas”. In the second move of Reassembling the Social, Latour even attributes to Haraway
the most outspoken version of the multiple layering of enactment (Latour 2005a, 208, note
276), while mutual citations are recurrent from the 2000s.


4. To conclude: where would we like to land, and with whom?
   The associations here discussed constitute two of the countless connections that Latour
was able to establish during his intellectual trajectory. It’s not my intention to claim they are
the most representative, but to suggest that they somehow illustrate Latour’s geo-politics,
at the same time local and global. After the Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Latour 2013),
Latour’s oeuvres have tried to move the compass of the public discourse to embrace the ter-
restrial. In Down to Earth (2018) he theorized two specular understandings of the global
and the local as “plus” (i.e., both global and local can be open, welcoming, prone to create
new associations beyond the modernist divide) and “minus” (i.e., both global and local can
be insecure, nostalgic, anchored to modernist categorizations). As the citation opening this
contribution makes explicit, with these specular understandings of the global and the local
Latour invites us to open the black-box of modernists associations, look at what is inside, and
start a new associating endeavor.
   My selection of the two associations discussed in this contribution constitutes a first at-
tempt to answer his invitation. Although it was local, the first association did not resolve
into a nostalgic, purely inward-looking exercise, but revealed many further associations that
contributed to weave what today we call STS. Similarly, the second association did not resolve
into a global, standardized exercise, but revealed alternative, local and situated genealogies
that over the years have contributed to build the STS field in its multiplicity. As a result of
these associations, STS have hit the ground in new territories, entanglements and overtures.
In this sense, following the two associations has allowed accounting for a geo-politics that is at
91                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

the same time local and global. The invitation suggests to continue this exercise of wondering
where we would like to land and with whom we would agree to share a dwelling place.


Notes

   1 An early version of this paper was presented at the 4S/ESOCITE conference in Cholula (Mexico)
on December 8, 2022. The panel “Bruno Latour: In Memoriam” was chaired by Emma Kowal and Le-
andro Rodriguez Medina, and featured Christopher Kelty, Sergio Sismondo, Wen-Ling Tu, Léa Maria
Leme Velho, Dominique Vinck and the author. The author wishes to thank the chairs for the opportu-
nity to process and publicly discuss Latour’s legacy in her work. “Drawing Bruno Together” was instead
the title of a panel in memoriam of Bruno Latour held at the IX STS Italia conference. The panel’s
title was suggested by Claudio Coletta. The panel was organized by the author and featured Madeleine
Akrich, Huub Dijstelbloem, Paul Edwards, Noortje Marres, Alvise Mattozzi, Tommaso Venturini.
   2 I wish to thank Sarah De Rijke for having pointed out that the personal intake could work as an
educational learning experience to be shared with contemporary students.
   3 Four years later I owed once again my thanks to Bruno Latour, but this time for a different reason.
Upon my request, he accepted to host my Marie Curie Action application and made sure that the aptest
colleagues supported its design and writing.
   4 I thank Assunta Vitteritti for pointing out this text to me. The rejection might not come as a sur-
prise, given that the paper staged an imaginary dialogue between Latour and Haraway.


References

Akrich, Madeleine and Latour, Bruno (1992) A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics
   of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies, in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/
   Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, pp. 259-264.
Dondero, Maria Giulia (2018) Bruno Latour et la sémiotique de l’énonciation: Fondements et évolutions,
   in “Symposium”, 22(1), pp. 22-40.
Fontanille, Jacques (2017) Des actes d’énonciation aux modes d’existence: À propos de “Petite philosophie
   de l’énonciation” de Bruno Latour, in Bruno Latour (ed.), Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione (con una
   nota di Jacques Fontanille), Rome, Aracne, pp. 53-63.
Haraway, Donna (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of par-
   tial perspective, in “Feminist Studies”, 14(3), pp. 575-599.
Haraway, Donna (1992) The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,
   in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, London and
   New York, Routledge, pp. 295-338.
Latour, Bruno (2005a) Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory, New York, Ox-
   ford University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2005b) Critical Distance or Critical Proximity? [Dialogue written for a book in homage
   of Donna Haraway but then rejected by the editor]. Available at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/
   default/files/P-113-HARAWAY.pdf (retrieved on September 27, 2023).
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                                  92

Latour, Bruno (2013) An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge
   (MA), Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge (UK), Polity Press.
Lykke, Nina, Markussen, Rando and Olesen, Finn (2000) “There are always more things going on than
   you thought!” Methodologies as Thinking Technologies. Interview with Donna Haraway, Part Two, in
   “Kvinder, Køn & Forskning”, 4, pp. 52-60.
Mol, Annemarie (2002) The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Durham, Duke University Press.
Paolucci, Claudio (2020) Persona: Soggettività nel linguaggio e semiotica dell’enunciazione, Milan, Bompiani.
Searle, John (2009, September 24) Why Should You Believe It?. The New York Review. Available at: https://
   www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/09/24/why-should-you-believe-it/ (retrieved on September 27, 2023).
Sismondo, Sergio (2010) An introduction to science and technology studies, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell.
Suchman, Lucy A. (1987) Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication,
   Cambridge (MA), Cambridge University Press.




Following Bruno Latour in Post-Critical Pedagogy1
Paolo Landri


1. Introduction
   In the attempt to write this article, I have started by trying to address the following ques-
tion: how can I add to what countless people have already said about Bruno Latour? The
work of Bruno Latour will be, for long, a source of inspiration for many. During his career,
he crossed many disciplinary boundaries, and it is thus not easy to define his work. Is it an-
thropology, sociology, or philosophy? Is he an ecological thinker, as some have underlined
after his death? His scientific identity is indeed somewhat elusive. His biographical notes and
institutional affiliations too, show his scholarship’s complexity. I concur with De Vries (2016)
to consider his research a conceptual and methodological repertoire for re-describing moder-
nity, revisiting its Constitution, and elaborating a path for its radical reform or a way out. His
work is, therefore, an essential reference in social science and, above all, a must-read for those
interested in developing a nuanced understanding of contemporary societal challenges.
   In order to enrich the current literature remembering Latour, in this article I will briefly
describe what have meant for me following Latour. I will do this from the perspective of
a sociologist who has contributed to circulating his work in education studies. Latour was
not an educationalist; nevertheless, his work fostered and supported the development of new
research networks between STS and education. Moreover, he was a highly appreciated teach-
er and developed a pedagogy to teach science and technology based on the de-scription of
controversies. The goal of this article is to locate his contribution to education studies in
his broad project of de/recomposing modern institutions. Latour was interested in revisiting
93                                                                       Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

modernity, not in destroying it, thus offering a space where its institutions (including educa-
tion) could be rethought.
   In the following, I will briefly illustrate 1) how, as a sociologist, I initially gained interest
and started to follow Bruno Latour’s work, 2) how following Bruno Latour has led to the
establishment of an STS-oriented area in studies of education.


2. Being interested in Bruno Latour

  Bruno Latour’s work first attracted me during my PhD in 1995. Departing from my soci-
ology of organisation background, I was searching for a way to study schools without neces-
sarily drawing on managerial or rationalist approaches. At that time, winds of reform were
blowing over the world, leading to an expansion of the neo-liberal agenda and the new public
management vocabularies and policy instrumentations (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007). In
this context, my research was a classical ethnography about the implementation of a reform
within Italian primary education. However, my research was not strictly an educational eth-
nography. In fact, it probably could have been considered as a research-case at the crossroads
of political and organization studies. During that time, I was in Naples, where I was working
with Roberto Serpieri, through whom I started to become acquainted with Silvia Gherardi
and Antonio Strati – and more in general with the Research Unit on Communication, Or-
ganizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA) at the University of Trento.
  As a scholar operating at the intersection of political and organization studies, I also start-
ed to be curious about Scandinavian neo-institutionalism, and particularly, about Barbara
Czarniaskwa’s work (1997). Indeed, her discussions about the concept of “translation”
seemed to be a promising direction to follow when rethinking the public administration re-
form in the context organization of primary schools in Italy. As she explains in her book, the
idea of “translation” was borrowed from Bruno Latour. Drawing on this notion, it was possi-
ble to go beyond the idea of “diffusion” in the Neo-institutionalist reading of the reforms that
ended to underestimate, or to negatively assess the frictions, the conflicts in the analysis of the
implementation processes. A quick exploration of Latour’s chain of references displaced my
work in considering the sociology of translation and Actor-Network Theory.
  First of all, as a sociologist trained with the idea of “actors” being implicitly and exclusively
humans, I was shocked by the idea that non-humans could have an agency in social reality.
However, it was also an invitation to see and study the world differently. At that time, there
was dissatisfaction with the overemphasis on language in organization studies brought by
post-modernism. Discourses, talks, languages, and other exquisitely “cultural” elements oc-
cupied the center stage of this kind of research, both theoretically and empirically.
  This attitude quickly spread within organization studies, sociology, anthropology, and psy-
chology. Many articles focused on language, identities, and subjectivities by privileging the
implementation of case studies and qualitative research. In this context, the vocabulary of
ANT appeared deeply transformative, inflating social science again with a wave of new ma-
terialism. Since then, the work of Bruno Latour, and more generally ANT, became the foci
of my attention. I started experimenting with these vocabularies and participated in many re-
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                        94

search projects, through which I was hoping to foster a wider circulation of his work in Italy.
   It was with this aim that I published my book L’innovazione nella scuola (2000). In follow-
ing this path, I also participated in the design and realization of Tradurre le riforme in pratica,
edited by Silvia Gherardi and Andrea Lippi (2000), for which I wrote a chapter and which
later on became an essential reference for the Italian debate on ANT.
   At that time, it was not easy to be a Latourian or an ANT-ish researcher. First, there was a
widespread misunderstanding of the acronym ANT in Italian academia. Not many scholars
could see the differences between ANT and network analysis. To some sociologists it was only
a new “French fashion”: just a way to play the academic game of distinguishing oneself in the
field. Also, a tendency for conservatism in the Italian scientific community pushed against
newcomers bearing strange vocabularies and challenging basic assumptions in social science.
   On the other hand, the use of semiotics and the tune-up of the ethnographic method of
Bruno Latour surely helped to reconsider the limitations of current investigation in the field
and disclosed many new possibilities for research. The chance of experimenting with a new
vocabulary was appealing, although this would have led to inevitable clashes with more estab-
lished paradigms in social sciences and to the risk of being marginalized within the academic
field. I remember how some academics openly discouraged me from following the destiny of
Mr. Latour! Even the scholars willing to explore new concepts and methodologies accused
ANT of not being critical enough, of not understanding the role of power, and of being just
another road leading to technological/material determinism (Gorur 2021).
   Initially, Latour was exclusively associated with ANT and science and technology studies.
As a reader, however, to me it was also clear that his work overwhelmed these boundaries.
Even if he is rightly considered one of ANT’s key authors and “fathers”, his later publications
clarified that his work assumed a much broader perspective. His critical appraisal suggested
that his research interest was much broader. Books like We Have Never Been Modern (1993),
and The Politics of Nature (2004a) showed that his project was in fact that of an anthropology
of modernity. By drawing on several empirical studies on key institutions of modernity, he
documented how the current dominant account of the modern condition was wrong. There
was a persistent gap between how Moderns represent what they do and what they actually do
in practice. This line of thought would later also have led to a new project (and book) called
An Inquiry Into the Mode of Existence (2013), where Latour positively tries to answer the
question: if we have never been modern, what have we been?
   These shifts have sometimes dismayed even in his most passionate readers. As one of the
results, the translation of his work in Italy has only been fragmentary. Since those interested
in his work had heterogeneous backgrounds, the translations of his books were not always
mindful of his trajectory. These limitations in the circulation of his work in Italy pushed
me to edit an Italian translation of some of his books. I initially thought about translating
Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996), but then I was surprised when I stumbled upon a
copy of La Fabrique du Droit (2002) in Paris, which I bought and immediately read. This
book disclosed a very diverse view of his work. I was struggling to give the appropriate place
for this work within the list of his publications. With the support of Domenico Lipari, I
personally contacted Bruno Latour, who was happy to know that his book about law would
appear in Italian. He also welcomed the idea of having an interview with him as an afterword.
95                                                                      Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

At that time, the book had already been widely debated in France, and Latour sent me arti-
cles discussing and interpreting it from different perspectives. Eventually, thanks to Pasquale
Gagliardi, who invited Latour in Italy for a seminar in 2006, we were able to realize the inter-
view at the Fondazione Cini in Venice2.
   The Interview illustrates how the empirical work on law was part of a broader project com-
paring truth conditions in the European tradition (Landri and Latour 2011, 56). In the in-
terview, he underlined how his earlier work on science and technology was just a necessary
step within the broader endeavor of comparing modernity’s key institutions. Whereas in his
ANT phase, he was eager to follow “networks”, now, in the After-ANT period, he was more
interested in selecting network’s “felicity conditions”. As such law was a specific connector
to “reassembling the social”, similarly it was technology, religion, politics, and economics. In
practice, he was anticipating An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence.
   After Fabrique du Droit (2002), other Latour’s books and articles were translated into
Italian. His ecological turn was in line with a renewed sensibility toward environmental is-
sues pervading scholarly environments. Similarly to what already happened previously, many
scholars pertaining to various disciplines were involved in projects of translation, inducing
some inevitable heterogeneity. In this regard, I also engaged in some unsuccessful attempts
to translate Reassembling the Social. Not many Italian sociologists were keen to support this
project: for some, he was not a sociologist. Latour was and still is troublesome for the socio-
logical community. Unsurprisingly, the Italian translation of Reassembling the Social was not
edited by sociologists. This is unfortunate, since it could have helped to foster and revive an
intense discussion about the future of sociology. By taking modernity as his central focus,
indeed, Latour’s work is a bench test for contemporary sociology.
   Nevertheless, the aim of his research program was not going beyond modernity but to rein-
vent it. His work is not critical in the canonical sense. “Critics is always right!”, he said many
times, while in a well-known article he also underlined how “critique is running out of steam”
(Latour 2004b). His program is rather post-critical since its intention is not to unveil, but to
recompose a common world by leaving the issue of what a common world is permanently
open. It is a way to abandon the modernist parenthesis and its dichotomic constitution (na-
ture/culture; facts/value; human/nonhuman) without destroying modernity.


3. Latour and Education Studies

   Following Latour means to be eager to embrace boundary-crossing and the development of
unexpected associations, even in those fields of investigation he did not often attend. For me,
this is the case of education. Bruno Latour was not an educationalist, and indeed he is more
well-known as a sociologist, philosopher, and anthropologist. Apart from a small parenthesis at
the beginning of his career, when he realized a sociological study of education, he never explic-
itly focused on the classical subjects of education, such as school, curriculum, or assessment.
   In 1974, he published a research report about the ideology behind the concept of compe-
tence in the industrial context of the Ivory Coast (Latour 1974). He documented that the ac-
cusation of incompetence towards the local executive managers, when they substituted white
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                      96

French managers in a colonial environment, could not be attributed to the “African mind” but
to the failing school system of the Ivory Coast. Since Ivory Coast’s schooling system was a copy
of the French one, it only imported engineering discourse and not practices associated to it.
   Latour concluded that competence is not something that resides in people’s minds, but
rather in a network. Here, he shared the idea of “situated learning”, which would have been
later further developed by anthropologists, social psychologists, and educationalists.
   After that work, he moved to the study of the “laboratory life” and only indirectly touched
on educational issues. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to say Latour’s work is irrelevant
to education studies.
   The extensive quotation of his work in education, not limited to STS scholars, confirmed
its usefulness as a resource for thinking about the complexities of the contemporary land-
scape of education: a time when modern education displays its limitations. The role of ANT
in creating a transnational network of scholars in education that actively promotes STS in
education is undeniable. In Italy, after my initial work, a small ANT-STS community in ed-
ucation studies arose, also thanks to the effort and dedication of Assunta Viteritti. Together,
we edited a Scuola Democratica special issue titled Sociomaterialità in educazione (2016)3.
Before that, we also worked in previous research projects drawing on ANT vocabulary to
describe the policy of school autonomy, where we paid attention to the agency of nonhumans
in education. The attention to materiality led us to connect with researchers in the education
field who can be considered antecedents of the approach, like Riccardo Massa, whose com-
munity of scholars develops post-humanistic accounts in education. Following Latour we
reinforced connections between the sociology of education and education studies.
   Internationally, following Latour was conducive to meeting other colleagues, like Jan Ne-
spor, who was the first to develop a fully ANT study in education (1994), and Tara Fenwick
and Richard Edwards, who were preparing a book on Actor-Network Theory and Educa-
tion (2010). Attending the European Conference of Educational Research, I also met with
Romuald Normand and Jean Louis Derouet (2000). Derouet knew Latour and his approach
very well and already tried to lean on sociology of translation to study education policy and
practice. Yet, Latour was more popular outside than inside France, where he had been severe-
ly criticized. Only on the international level was there some chance to create a space that could
support the development of a favorable place for an ANT community. That was the case for
the Network 28 “Sociologies of Education”, where many ANT scholars have found an arena
to present and discuss their works (see, for example, the EERJ Special Issue Mobile Sociologies
of Education, Landri and Neumann 2014). Meeting Radhika Gorur was particularly impor-
tant: she contributed internationally to the circulation of ANT and Bruno Latour’s work in
education policy (Gorur 2015).
   Latour’s contribution to education extended well beyond just ANT. In this case, howev-
er, his contribution is still waiting to be recognized. We can summarize the relevance of his
work through the concept of post-criticality. In the after-ANT period, he was interested in a
compositionist agenda. It provided some ideas, like the Parliament of Things, the focus on
controversies and “An inquiry into the modes of existence” (AIME), that have stimulated the
investigation of educational scholars on how to rethink education.
   The Parliament of Things was a metaphor proposed by Latour (1996) to give a name to
97                                                                    Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

the development of common worlds made up of hybrids, that is, the association of humans
and nonhumans. Here, he reprised an old meaning of “thing” in English and other European
languages, using it to point out to a meeting, a gathering, where something is made public.
   By extending the analogy, schools too, are like a Parliament of Things. Desks, blackboards,
seats, rooms, documents, circulars, teachers, headteachers, students and digital platforms are
all “school things” defining complex associations of humans and nonhumans.
   Further, the idea of “thing” allows the articulation of a thing-centred pedagogy (Vlieghe
and Zamojski 2019) that goes beyond a teacher-centred pedagogy (where knowledge is im-
posed on students) and a student-centred pedagogy (where student’s needs are at the centre).
In a thing-centered pedagogy, the essential teaching gesture is making everyone attentive in
the room toward subjects that become “subject matters”. It clarifies that education is an in-
tergenerational gathering between generations. As Hanna Arendt would say, it concerns the
world’s transmission and possibly its renewal. It is always about a thing, that is, something
that has materiality on its own, that deserves to be given attention and to be passed on to
the new generation. At the same time, a thing-centered pedagogy discloses the possibility of
renewing the world or some aspects of the world when passing it on to the new generation.
   The idea of the Parliament of Things suggests that the re-composition of a common world
involves dealing with controversies. A focus on controversies is educationally fruitful and has
led to developing a specific kind of pedagogy that Latour describes in Cogitamus (2010).
   Except for a chapter in Reassembling the Social (2005), Cogitamus is the only book with an
explicit educational goal. Here, Latour designs a course at a distance for an imaginary German
female student. In doing so, he writes six letters to help the student to attend the course and
develop her expertise in science, technology and society. This epistolary course is builds upon
the physically attended course that Latour previously delivered at Science Po under the title
“Humanités Scientifiques”. Moreover, and not by chance, the six letters mirror the six chap-
ters of Descarte’ foundational book of modernity.
   In Cogitamus (2010), Latour suggests an inquiry-based method of learning. An inquiry
complemented by dialogue. Knowing is not an individual affair (cogitos, according to Des-
cartes), rather it is a collective endeavor (cogitamus). The proposed inquiry method envisages
the student’s participation in the knowing process mediated by a notebook that collects many
materials (articles, documents, etc.). Latour’s letters contain the theoretical and methodolog-
ical guidelines to give a sense of the exploration and boundary crossing between science and
society. The tone of the letters is informative, but also ironic. The teacher draws on maps,
illustrative schemes, and examples. Pedagogy, here, is equivalent to the cartography of con-
troversies presented in academic articles and developed by Latour together with his team col-
laborating in an EU-funded project (MACOSPOL4) (Venturini et al. 2015). An important
aspect of the cartography of controversies is “making things in public” that Latour carried out
by drawing on alliances with arts and digital devices. The underlying logic is to counter the
reductionist and limited account of science and technology in modernity. The goal is not to
deconstruct but rather to recompose science, technology, and society differently.
   Regardless of the importance of this latter goal, it is somewhat surprising that education is
not fully included in “An inquiry on the modes of existence”. In AIME, Latour affirms that:
Akrich, Dijstelbloem, Pelizza and Landri                                                           98

     humanoids become humans – thinking, speaking humans, by dint of association with the
     beings of technology, fiction, and reference. They become skillful, imaginative, capable of
     objective knowledge by dint of grappling with these modes of existence. (Latour 2013, 372)

   However, it took the work of Jonathan Tummons (2021) to argue that “Education” should
be on the list of the modes of existence. With Tummons’s article, education passes the test
of AIME cosmology, but what counts as “educational” in education in this inquiry is vague.
   The “educational” aspect in Latour emerges more clearly in the latest production, in books
like Down to Earth (2018) or Facing Gaia (2017), when he brings ecological materialism as
an antidote to counter the nature-culture dualism (Landri 2023). In those works, and in line
with his pedagogy of controversies and his love for science and technology, he seems to orient
toward a thing-centered pedagogy as a felicity condition for the institution of education in
the new climate regime: an educational approach dealing with the permanently open ques-
tion of renewing our common world.
   Is Latour arguing that education is inherently political, as argued in critical pedagogy? It is
unlikely, by considering his criticism of the critical approach. Why is he convinced that edu-
cation is not a specific way of reassembling the social with a proper felicity condition, like law,
technology, and religion? These questions open new lines of investigation and would need
additional analysis for his work to be properly addressed.


4. To conclude
   In sum: follow an actor, and you will find a network! Isn’t it one of Latour’s well-known
teachings?
   Following Latour has been generative of new relations and associations across disciplinary
boundaries and countries. It has solicited a detailed redescription of education through the
emergence of the studies of STS in education that are promising resources in revisiting mod-
ern education. Educationally, ANT and Latour invite the development of a thing-centered
pedagogy that challenges human exceptionalism and suggests acknowledging the mutual con-
stitution of humans and nonhumans. Further work with and near Latour is needed to grapple
with the complexity of the current educational scenarios and develop perspectives to reinforce
educational institutions and cope with emerging subjectivities in the new climate regime.


Notes

  1 I would like to thank Radhika Gorur for her comments. Thanks also to Fabio Maria Es-
posito for his help on a previous draft of this article.
  2 A transcription of the interview was also published in Tecnoscienza (Landri and Latour 2011).
  3 In English: “Sociomaterialities in education”.
  4 See https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/en/activities/macospol/.
99                                                                             Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

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