Asdal's Incremental Latour Enhancement

Not to beat a dead horse, but I was surprised by what I heard in class as something of an out of hand dismissal of Kristin Asdal's claim on the grounds that it fails to offer anything truly contrary or "new" to Latour's black box. While I appreciate that networky strategies are all about a constant process of (re)evaluation, this type of knee-jerk condescension fails to differ from “old-world” science in any significant way. Rather would I expect students of Latour to appreciate any additional contributions on both their own merits as well as anything they may have to offer, including nuance. I certainly would not expect such a crass assumption that she was simply stirring up trouble by eschewing Latour while simultaneously trumpeting his concepts as her own. Maybe college students might think they could get away with that, but what professional journal would fail to see through such a self-serving strategy? We have seen political wrangling as a very real aspect of “mobilizing the world,” but I thought a major point of this exercise in Science Philosophy was to apprehend the potential value of any relevant contributions to upstream OR downstream process; put another way, have we not been prepared be more suspicious of apparent black boxes in favor of a more fluid concept of nature-states? Is a claim's relative weight merely proportional to its effectiveness as a counter-argument?

For all the hairsplitting about her terminology (which no doubt is pointless to debate without her own elucidation here or elsewhere), I particularly valued Asdal's contribution even if for no other reason than that it served to clarify by paraphrasal the essential core of Latour's black box. I would even be surprised to find that Latour was not himself influenced by her other primarily quoted source, Michel Foucault, particularly as she points out, relative to actor-network theory, that Foucault regards human practices within the context of relations (125). Relations are in fact at the heart of her argument, especially with “the ways in which enactments of nature and the enactments of economy go together” and how “Nature is grasped as a relational effect of its relations to economy, or rather accounting and economies, in the plural” (124).

Moreover she opines, “What we tend to call politics very often turns out to be another science, and by studying politics and administration empirically, we can explore natural science in its co-production, its relation, to ‘the economy’” (125). I believe this alone helps to push Latour's argument further downstream by democratizing what it means to be “a science” within the process of advancing webworky claims. It is perhaps important to note here that she does not fetter herself much with the concept of claims. Aspects of Nature are simply quantifiable in response to conflicting natures (or story lines) and Nature-wholes are the paradigms resulting from negotiations between equally viable disciplines. She is more concerned with negotiated outcomes of institutional consciousness derived from the same source data yet motivated by differing principles balanced against each other.

Perhaps Asdal fails to adequately differentiate herself when she claims to “turn the philosophical argument of Latour on its head...by treating...the emergence of this new Nature-whole...empirically and historically” (124), but this is only the preparatory half of her approach. Latour does indeed take Nature as his starting point in his piece on Circulating References, signifying its “out-there-ness,” while she prefers to view Nature as “the outcome — a consequence of a series of practices and transformations.” She admits to drawing upon Latour and even fails to note Latour's likely agreement with “social theories on the politics of nature [which contend that] 'nature' can only be grasped indirectly through the intermediaries of science” (attributed to U. Beck, Risk-society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992).

Rather she is concerned with “demonstrat[ing] the rich confusion in the making of a specific version of out-there-ness...which, literally, may be said to have been the result of this endeavour” (124). Where Asdal succeeds is her cogent delineation of how “objects of nature could potentially grow in size and significance, to the extent that they could touch upon and interfere with the factory” (125), due to its emmissions of flourine killing local farmers' animals. “What was at stake was not an external ‘nature’, a nature ‘out-there’, but rather two forms of economic life, two ways of living, in confrontation with each other.” It is in this way, she suggests, that the “politics of nature emerged in relation to industry and the factory.” Similarly, “ecology played an important role in enacting a specific whole, in relation, competition and confrontation, with another abstract space, namely the economy” (126) as the critical load map was squared off against cost-effectiveness.