Exercises in irreduction: Some Latourian favourites.

Abstract

In the days after Bruno Latour passed away, many scholars celebrated his life by sharing lists of their favourite pieces of his. These primarily featured Latour’s newer works and well-known books, but almost none of the minor writings that first enamoured me with him some decades ago. In the spur of a moment, I shared a list on Twitter of my favourite lesser-known texts, which I expand on here. If a single word was to capture what I found so appealing about those older pieces, it would be irreduction: the insistence, as Latour wrote in the manifesto that back ended The Pasteurization of France, that ‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (Latour, 1988a, p. 158). So, without further ado, a few exercises in irreduction. ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Society and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So’ made Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy central to ANT. But the French electric car—a new and barely existing environmental technology in the 1970s—pushed Callon and Latour (1981) to redefine his Leviathan to make it possible to imagine a society without fixed scales. They called the essay a ‘teratology’; a term normally reserved for the medical study of abnormal bodily developments or monsters. Why did innovations in electric vehicles half a century ago require a teratology? Because Electricity of France, the state-owned utility company, had to imagine and shape heterogeneous relations for an entire world—including everything from technical models to new green subjects, changing economic systems to battery components—where the not-yet-existing electric vehicles would fit like hand in glove. Meanwhile, the carmaker Renault clearly understood that this brave new world would pose an existential threat to the already existing one, home to its gas-guzzling machines. Hence, it spared no effort to identify and undermine the weakest links in the world under construction.