The Public Proceduralization of Contingency: Bruno Latour and the Formation of Collective Experiments

Abstract

Social scientists have traditionally attempted to avoid extending strategies for acquiring experimental knowledge to the sphere of the social. Bruno Latour, however, has introduced a notion of the collective experiment, an experiment conducted by and with us all. In this short paper I seek to explore, by way of elucidating the talk of collective experiments, that Latour’s notion has long since existed in the theory and practice of ecological design and restoration. Practitioners in ecological restoration projects find themselves in a situation of double contingency, since neither do they know how nature will respond to their intervention nor is their interpretation of these responses already certain. Experimental practice in society then becomes the proceduralization of this contingency.

Keywords:

• Public Experiments
• Experiment and Society
• Science and Democracy
• Bruno Latour
• Public Ecology

Notes

[1] For a summary on the debate Bourdieu has triggered with this book, see Kim (2009).

[2] On the historical embeddedness of the “Science Wars” in controversies over contemporary shifts in the status of science, see Bammé (2004), Callon (1999), and Parsons (2003).

[3] This essay first appeared in print in German in 2001 in the quality weekly newspaper Die Zeit entitled “Ein Experiment von und mit uns allen” (“An experiment conducted by and with us all”), and has since been reprinted and revised several times. The most accessible English version can be found on Bruno Latour’s own website. Available from http://www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-95%20MAX%20PLANCK.html; INTERNET.

[4] Please note that small grammatical errors have been left in from the English version available on Latour’s website.

[5] For some examples of this from a variety of disciplinary and geographical perspectives, see Brown (2006), Mahon et al. (2009), Newig, Voß, and Monstadt (2008), Renn, Webler, and Wiedemann (1995), or Rogers (2008).

[6] There are two more central aspects of a textbook definition of experiment that are bracketed out by Latour, so I will not consider them any further. They should, nevertheless, be noted. They are the controls of boundary conditions and the importance of independent and dependent variables.

[7] Simmel’s concept of “societalization” has often been noted as being a processual concept and therefore as an alternative to Gesellschaft—although there is seldom any proximity to Latour’s ideas. However, see on this point Gross (2003) and Pyyhtinen (2007). George Herbert Mead’s quasi‐actor network theory‐based ideas are also relevant here (cf. Puddephatt 2005).

[8] On the conceptual relation between non‐knowledge, ignorance, and nescience as well as several types of surprises in the context of debates about a shift toward more post‐normal, mode 2, or transdisciplinary science, see Gross (2010).