Bruno Latour

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Bruno Latour (2006)

Bruno Latour (born June 22, 1947 in Beaune ) is a French sociologist and philosopher . His main focus is on the sociology of science and technology . Latour is one of the founders of the actor network theory .

Life

Bruno Latour - coming from a family of winemakers - studied philosophy , anthropology and Bible exegesis . He received his PhD from the University of Tours in 1975 . During his military service in Africa, he developed an interest in the social sciences and wrote an ethnographic study of French methods of industrial education in Abidjan . In 1979 Latour published together with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar Laboratory Life , the result of his field studies in the laboratory of the later Nobel Prize winner Roger Guillemin . Latour was able to show the roles that rhetorical strategies and technical artefacts play in the “construction of scientific facts”. With Science in Action , published in 1987 , Bruno Latour extended this initially social constructivist argument to the field of technology. Together with other sociologists, especially Michel Callon and John Law , he developed the actor-network theory , which goes beyond social constructivism. Unlike this, the actor-network theory does not assume that technology and reality are socially constructed. Rather, the view is held that technology / nature and the social ascribe properties and potential for action to each other in a network. On the basis of these considerations, Latour later developed, We have never been modern and The Parliament of Things, a critique of “modern” society. In 1982 he became professor of sociology at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris . In 1987 he completed his habilitation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales . In the Science Wars of the 1990s, Latour was heavily criticized by Alan Sokal, among others . In Pandora's Hope , Latour dealt with this criticism.

In addition to his scientific work in the narrower sense, he was together with Peter Weibel curator of the exhibitions Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005) at the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media Technology .

Bruno Latour was awarded the Siegfried Unseld Prize on September 28, 2008 in Frankfurt am Main , as a “great innovator of the social sciences”, who, as “crossing the border between natural sciences and humanities, theory and empiricism, morality and politics, the mechanisms of modern Truth production and its consequences investigated ”, as the jury justified. He was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that year .

On February 8, 2010, Bruno Latour accepted the Munich University Society's Culture Prize at the Ludwig Maximilians University. The jury based its decision on the fact that “Bruno Latour is one of the most influential, intelligent and at the same time most popular representatives of science studies”.

For 2013, Latour was awarded the Holberg Prize, worth 4.5 million Norwegian kroner (around 610,000 euros at the time of award) . The award committee praised his "ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, regarding fundamental categories such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human". In 2015, Latour was appointed to the Albertus Magnus Professorship at the University of Cologne . In 2018 he was elected to the British Academy .

Research and theses

Bruno Latour first became famous through the sociological study Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , which he published in 1979 together with Steve Woolgar. On the basis of a participatory observation begun in 1975 at the Salk Institute in California , he developed a social constructivist view of research cultures. His aim was to research the “production” of scientific results at the place where they were created, namely in the laboratory work of the scientists. Latour and Woolgar came to the conclusion that the activity of scientists should be understood as a special "cycle of credibility" through which scientists actively establish the credibility of their work in order to "accumulate" recognition. Within a cycle, funds, data, prestige, problem areas, arguments and publications are linked and translated into one another as “credits”. (If a scientist has discovered a problem area, for example, it may provide him with arguments that he can convert into publications. These in turn can bring him prestige, which can be relevant for the acquisition of third-party funding , so that further data can be collected, etc. ) With their study, Latour and Woolgar became modern classics of social science research , although Latour later moved away from the social constructivist starting point.

In his time at the National Ecole Supérieure des Mines , he has worked with Michel Callon and John Law , the actor-network theory (actor network theory) developed, which has established itself as a separate school of thought in sociology.

In the essay Why has Critique run out of Steam? from 2004, Latour also raised concerns about the impact and appropriateness of social constructivist criticism. In this context, he raised the question of whether the danger today might no longer arise from ideological arguments disguised as facts, but rather the other way round: from an "excessive mistrust" of facts that are wrongly considered to be ideological arguments. Among other things, Latour laments the "artificially kept running" controversy about global warming, the abuse of social constructivism by climate change deniers: "Dangerous extremists use the same argument of social construction to destroy laboriously obtained evidence that could save our lives." "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives." )

One of Latour's most important studies is his work Aramis or the love of technology , published in 1993 (which has so far been available in French, since 1996 also in English and since 2018 also completely in German). In sequences of interview passages and research notes, Latour traces the development of the innovative but ultimately failed transport project "Aramis", which was supposed to combine the advantages of private and public transport through a computer-controlled PRT system . Using the contradicting interests and hopes of the various project participants, Latour shows how social and even sentimental aspects - the “love of technology” - contribute to the rise and fall of innovations.

Monographs (chronological)

  • with Steve Woolgar: Laboratory Life. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts . Beverly Hills 1979, ISBN 0-8039-0993-4 . ( Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts . 2nd ed., Princeton 1986, ISBN 0-691-02832-X .)
  • Les microbes: guerre et paix suivi de irréductions . Paris 1984, ISBN 978-2-7071-7011-8 .
  • Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society . Milton Keynes 1987, ISBN 0-674-79291-2 .
  • Nous n'avons jamais été modern . Paris 1991, ISBN 2-7071-2083-9 .
    • deutsch We have never been modern. Attempt at a symmetrical anthropology . Translated by Gustav Roßler. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-05-002582-4 (New edition Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13777-2 . New edition Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518- 29461-1 )
  • Aramis, ou l'amour des techniques . Paris 1993, ISBN 2-7071-2120-7 .
    • Aramis or the Love of Technology . Cambridge (Mass.) 1996, ISBN 0-674-04323-5 .
    • German: Aramis or the love of technology. With a new foreword v. Bruno Latour and an afterword v. Henning Schmidgen. Translated by Gustav Roßler. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-16-153995-4
  • La clef de Berlin et other leçons d'un amateur de sciences . Paris 1993, ISBN 2-7071-2274-2 .
    • German: The Berlin Key. Explorations of a lover of science . Translated from the French by Gustav Roßler. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-05-002834-3 .
  • Politiques de la nature: comment faire entrer les sciences en democratie . Paris 1999, ISBN 2-7071-3078-8 .
    • German: The Parliament of Things. For a political ecology . Translated from the French by Gustav Roßler. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41282-5 .
  • Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies . Cambridge (Mass.) 1999, ISBN 0-674-65335-1 .
    • German: The hope of Pandora. Investigations into the Reality of Science . Translated from the French by Gustav Roßler. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-58296-8 .
  • Jubiler ou Les tours de la parole religieuse . Paris 2002, ISBN 2-84671-009-0 .
    • German: Jubilieren. About religious speech. Translated from the French by Achim Russer. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-58563-4 .
  • Iconoclash or is there a world beyond image warfare? Translated from the English by Gustav Roßler. Merke, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-88396-178-7 .
  • La fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d'État , Paris 2002, ISBN 2-7071-3581-X .
    • English: The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat , Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-7456-3984-0 .
    • The legal factory. An ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat , Konstanz University Press, Konstanz 2016, ISBN 978-3-86253-054-0 .
  • War of the Worlds - How About Peace? Translated from the English by Gustav Roßler. Merve, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-88396-196-5 .
  • From realpolitik to thing politics or how to make things public . Translated from the English by Gustav Roßler. Merve, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-88396-214-7 .
  • Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor Network Theory . Oxford 2005, ISBN 0-19-925604-7 .
    • German: A new sociology for a new society. Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Translated from the English by Gustav Roßler. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-58488-0 .
  • Misery of criticism. From the war for facts to matters of concern . Translated from the English by Heinz Jatho. Diaphanes, Zurich 2007 ISBN 978-3-03734-021-9 .
  • with Vincent Lépinay: L'économie, science des intérêts passionnés. Introduction à l'anthropologie économique de Gabriel Tarde . Paris 2008 ISBN 978-2-7071-5644-0
    • German: The economy as a science of passionate interests. An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology . Translated from the French by Gustav Roßler. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-58556-6 .
  • Cogitamus. Six lettres sur les humanités scientifiques. La Découverte, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-7071-6688-3 .
    • German: Cogitamus . Translated from the French by Bettina Engels and Nikolaus Gramm. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-26038-8 .
  • Inquiry on the modes of existence. Une anthropology of the modern. La Découverte, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-7071-7347-8 .
  • Jubilee ou les tours de la parole religieuse. La Découverte, Paris 2013, ISBN 978-2-35925-074-9 .
  • Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique . La Découverte, Paris 2015 ISBN 978-2-35925-108-1 .
    • German: fight for Gaia. Eight lectures on the new climate regime . Translated from the French by Achim Russer, Bernd Schwibs. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017 ISBN 978-3-518-58701-0 .
  • Où atterrir? Comment s'orienter en politique. La Découverte, Paris 2017, ISBN 978-2-7071-9700-9 .
    • German: The terrestrial manifesto , from the French by Bernd Schwibs. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-07362-9 .

Exhibitions

literature

  • Arno Bammé : Science in Transition. Bruno Latour as a symptom. Metropolis, Marburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89518-711-7 .
  • Andrea Belliger, David Krieger (Ed.): ANThology. An introductory guide to actor network theory. transcript, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-89942-479-4 .
  • Anders Blok, Torben Elgaard Jensen: Bruno Latour. Hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world , Routledge, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-60278-5 .
  • Nina Degele , Timothy Simms: Bruno Latour: pure post-constructivism. In: M. Hofmann, T. Korta, S. Niekisch (Eds.): Culture Club. Classics of cultural theory. Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-29268-4 , pp. 259-275.
  • Lars Gertenbach: Delimitation of the Sociology. Bruno Latour and Constructivism . Velbrück, Weilerswist 2015, ISBN 978-3-95832-049-9 .
  • Lars Gertenbach / Henning Laux : On the topicality of Bruno Latour. Introduction to his work . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2019.
  • Graham Harman: Prince of Networks. Bruno Latour and Metaphysics , re.press, Melbourne 2009, ISBN 978-0-9805440-6-0 .
  • Graham Harman: Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Political , Pluto Press, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-7453-3399-1 .
  • Markus Holzinger: Nature as a social actor. Realism and Constructivism in Science and Social Theory. Opladen 2004.
  • Markus Holzinger: What realism? Which social constructivism? A comment on Georg Kneer's defense of social constructivism and on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. In: Journal of Sociology. Issue 6/2009, pp. 521-535.
  • Markus Holzinger: Where are the missing practices? Bruno Latour's experimental metaphysics. In: Journal for Theoretical Sociology. (ZTS), issue 1/2013, pp. 31-55.
  • Markus Holzinger: The scientific experiment as an "event". On the object and nature conception by Latour and Dewey , in: Hella Dietz / Frithjof Nungesser / Andreas Pettenkofer (eds.): Pragmatism and theories of social practices. The benefit of a theory difference . Frankfurt / M., Pp. 223-260. ISBN 978-3-593-50722-4 .
  • Georg Kneer , Markus Schroer , Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.): Bruno Latour's collective. Controversies on the delimitation of the social. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-29462-8 .
  • Werner Krauss : Bruno Latour. In: Stephan Moebius , Dirk Quadflieg (Ed.): Culture. Present theories. VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14519-3 .
  • Henning Laux : Sociology in the Age of Composition. Coordinates of an integrative network theory . Velbrück, Weilerswist 2014.
  • Henning Laux (ed.): Bruno Latour's sociology of modes of existence. Introduction and discussion. Bielefeld: Transcript 2016.
  • Stephan Moebius : Postmodern Theorists of French Sociology. The Collège de Sociologie, Edgar Morin, Michel Maffesoli, Bruno Latour. In: Dirk Kaesler (ed.): Current theories of sociology. From Shmuel N. Eisenstadt to postmodernism. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52822-8 , pp. 332-350.
  • Gustav Roßler: Social Realization. Keys, people, things , in: Bruno Latour, Der Berliner Schlüssel, Berlin: botopress 2014, pp. 33–41.
  • Gustav Roßler: The proportion of things in society. Sociality - Cognition - Networks . Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3297-2 .
  • Gustav Roßler: Is a non-anthropocentric sociology conceivable? Sociology as an anthropological human science in Foucault and Latour's alternative . In: Le Foucaldien, 4 (1), 8 (2018), doi: 10.16995 / lefou.52 .
  • Reiner Ruffing: Bruno Latour . W. Fink, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-8252-3044-9 .
  • Henning Schmidgen: Bruno Latour for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-680-4 .
  • Leander Scholz: The justice of ecology: Bruno Latour and the political project of a parliament of things , in: Friedrich Balke / Maria Muhle / Antonia von Schöning (eds.): The return of things , Kadmos, Berlin 2011, pp. 115–128 .
  • Timothy Simms: Bruno Latour: Sociology of Hybridization. In: S. Moebius, L. Peter (Ed.): French sociology of the present. Konstanz 2004, ISBN 3-8252-2571-2 , pp. 379-393.
  • Uwe Schimank : The Impossible Separation of Nature and Society - Bruno Latour's Diagnosis of the Self-Deception of Modernity. In: U. Schimank, U. Volkmann (ed.): Sociological contemporary diagnoses I. Opladen 2002, ISBN 3-8252-2158-X , pp. 157-169.
  • Vries, Gerard de: Bruno Latour. Polity, Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-0-7456-5063-0
  • Matthias Wieser: Bruno Latour's network. transcript, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-8376-2054-2 .

Web links

Commons : Bruno Latour  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Bruno Latour  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bruno Latour: An attempt to write the “Compositionist Manifesto”. In: Telepolis . February 11, 2010.
  2. ↑ Massimo Pigliucci : Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk . University of Chicago Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-226-66786-7 , pp. 255f.
  3. ↑ Several critics accused him of writing about Einstein's theories of relativity without having understood them, see John Huth: Latour's Relativity. In: Noretta Koertge (Ed.): A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. Oxford University Press, 1998, chapter 11.
  4. ↑ Siegfried Unseld Prize goes to sociologist Bruno Latour. Retrieved September 16, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Foreign Honorary Members - Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Fall 2014
  6. ↑ The sociologist Bruno Latour receives the culture award of the Munich University Society. In: Information Service Wissenschaft Online . December 1, 2009.
  7. ↑ Holberg International Memorial Prize 2013 is awarded to Bruno Latour. at: holbergprisen.no , accessed on March 13, 2013.
  8. ^ Stephan Moebius: Postmodern theorists of French sociology. The Collège de Sociologie, Edgar Morin, Michel Maffesoli, Bruno Latour. In: Dirk Kaesler (Ed.): Current Theories of Sociology - From Shmuel N. Eisenstadt to Postmodernism. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52822-8 , pp. 332-350.
  9. ↑ a b Bruno Latour: Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, PDF . In: Critical Inquiry. Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 225-248.
  10. ↑ In 1993 a short version was published. Bruno Latour: Ethnography of a 'High-Tech' Case: About Aramis. In: P. Lemonnier (Ed.): Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic. Routledge, London 1993, ISBN 0-415-07331-6 , pp. 372-398.
  11. ↑ Aramis is the French abbreviation for Agencement en Rames Automatisées de Modules Indépendants dans les Stations (Bruno Latour: Aramis or the love of technology. Cambridge 1996, p. 304).
  12. ↑ To Jubilee. About religious speech : Like a love talk , in: Deutschlandfunk from September 6, 2011.
  13. ↑ Let's find a new earth in FAZ of July 21, 2016, page 12
  14. ↑ Laboratory Customs. In: FAZ . December 19, 2011, p. 26.
personal data
SURNAME Latour, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Beaune , France