Where do we draw the line between art and science? I’ve posed this question several times now and still have very different answers. If I were to ask this question to Bruno Latour, sociologist and philosopher, maybe he would say: all these distinctions were produced by what we call modernism.
With modernism we started to separate the human from the non-human world and distinguish between the fields of law, science, politics and so on.

In his work of science study Latour tries to trace back scientific findings to the social mechanisms of knowledge production. One early account in the field of science study was his book ‘Laboratory Life’ from 1979 where he did field work in a laboratory and observed the daily activities of the scientists. In short, his work suggested that scientific facts were socially constructed. While he was once clearly associated with this form of constructivism Latour is now trying to distance himself from such claims: He saw the dangerous influence that his critical ideas had on conspiracy theorists, such as ‘skeptics’ in the climate change ‘debate’. Ever since, Latour is defending himself against the constructivist claims.

Rather than saying that science is just another language, thus constructing what appears to be a reality, Latour suggests that there is in fact an objective reality out there and science is able to uncover that reality. It is able to do so because knowledge is produced in meticulous translation work and with help from technologies that – as the advancement of these technologies shows – are neither fully human nor fully non-human. Thus, Latour cannot be a constructivist but he is neither a realist.

What is he? This a very difficult question to answer. His work seems contradictory and maybe this comes from belonging to the type of thinkers that breaks with established thinking schemes. Just like Tim Ingold. The only thing that I could sum up with certainty is that Latour tries to bring together what has been separated in an attempt to be modern. And while his and Ingolds approaches are both radically different from ‘mainstream’ science they also seem incompatible with one another.

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