by Steven Shapin
Three facts about Bruno Latour. He was from a wine-growing family; he was from Burgundy; and he was Catholic. These facts are related, and they are pertinent to understanding what his philosophical project was about. Bruno was born with silver in his mouth and that silver was a tastevin. I don’t believe that Bruno ever needed the money that came from an academic career. The stunning Parisian flat in the rue Danton was an inheritance from the family. He professed little interest in either wine or commercial things. His oldest brother took over the business, and he once told me that, as the youngest son and the youngest of eight children, he was “destined for the clerisy,” the family intending him for the priesthood.[1] I knew the wines of Maison Louis Latour before I knew Bruno, and, despite his claimed indifference to wine, that was why I was seriously impressed when I met him—this was, I think, just before Laboratory Life was published—and I occasionally teased him about his poor career choice, for which my reward was several bottles of Corton when he came over to dinner at my house in San Diego.
Once, I think I went a bit too far with the teasing. In the early 1980s, the newspapers were reporting a scandal in the French wine trade. It was alleged that the red wines of Maison Louis Latour were pasteurized—this taken as a serious conflict with their authenticity and naturalness. Culture, it was said, was here corrupting nature. Louis Latour, then president of Maison Latour and Bruno’s oldest brother, fired back in a letter to Decanter magazine. Yes, the house’s red wines were flash-pasteurized—up to 70 degrees Celsius for just a few minutes, as they long had been. Pasteurization killed the microbes, but the development of the wines in barrel was a purely physical process, to do with oxygenation and internal chemical reactions, nothing to do with the pasteurized dead bacteria and yeasts. Moreover, the whole notion of what was natural with respect to wine was based on massive misunderstanding. Wine was a natural product and it was a cultural product. It was either a mere convention or an error of speech to say that wine was one sort of thing or the other. Modernity pulled these things apart; the voice of tradition was to draw things together, or, rather, to point out that they were never apart.
The pinot noir vine was at once natural and artefactual; the juice of the grape might ferment without human intervention, but the fermentation of grape juice into wine was a choreography of agency—the vine, its cultivation by humans, the vine’s incorporation of minerals from the soil, the transformation of sugar into ethanol brought about by the Saccharomyces yeast, the vintner’s decision to allow or disallow the malolactic fermentation, the Limousin oak trees which provided wood for the barrels, the coopers who framed the oak staves into barrels. You can say that wine—any sort of wine—is a natural thing only on the condition that what you mean by natural is some particular version of these networks. This was country wisdom. Any farmer knew this, any joiner, any cheese-maker, any wine-maker.
When, around that time, Bruno brought the Corton to dinner, I joked about the pasteurization, and he was not amused. He too-modestly confessed that he knew little about wine, but what he told me was the same sort of thing that his brother had been saying in response to the Maison’s critics: wine had always been a product of both artifice and nature; it was a creation of what the vine gives and what the skilled oenologist makes. In later interviews and essays, Bruno wanted it understood that he was a son of a particular terroir: he came from “a countryside in Burgundy that is so old and so artificial that it was already ancient at the time of the Roman invasion of Gaul.” The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside—a lesson I learned long before I met Bruno, from W. G. Hoskins’s marvelous and under-appreciated The Making of the English Landscape (1954). It’s hard to be modern or artificial in Burgundy, and, at the same time, it’s also hard to be ancient or natural.
Just as Bruno was bred up in a wine family, so was he bred up into Catholicism. He made no secret of his Catholicism. He went to church regularly, and he said so. He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.” The first time I was aware of his religious observance was when I was with him at the Basilica in Beaune (the Collégiale Notre-Dame)—I believe this was in the mid-1980s. I hadn’t thought of this before: after all, I knew almost no one in my line of academic work who was religious in any significant way, and here was a French intellectual—a group I had understood to be aggressively secular—taking communion. He made nothing of it, nor, at the time, had I thought much about religious sensibilities in his published work.
But then at the funeral service at the Chapelle Saint-Louis in the Salpêtrière, there it was. Bruno left detailed instructions for the service, including the production and display of a digitalized representation of Rogier van der Weyden’s mid-fifteenth-century Last Judgement polyptych altarpiece in the Hospices de Beaune, an art work that Bruno made much of in his discussions of salvation and of “the end of days.” The service was, of course, a Mass, but it was, I believe, the first Mass—and plausibly the last—that contained readings from texts in Science and Technology Studies. Sections of Bruno’s writings—from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia,and the Irréductions appended to The Pasteurization of France—were read out by colleagues and friends. The final reading was a section about Robinson Crusoe delivered by Simon Schaffer.[2]
Then there was, of course, the liturgy of the Mass itself, of which the holiest moment is the Eucharist, the consecration and consumption of bread and wine, transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. At the precise moment of the ringing of an altar bell, the wine—itself a natural/artefactual entity—becomes something else—material/spiritual, human/non-human—a holy metaphysical monster. The same wine that, when consumed in an everyday secular idiom, becomes the body and blood of priests, philosophers, and workers in the vineyard—a fit subject for modern materialist accounting.
I think that most people in our part of the academic world knew of Bruno’s Catholicism—from the early work on Biblical hermeneutics and the Irréductions of 1984, he explicitly addressed religious concerns—but few knew what they should or could make of it, and even fewer—especially in our line of work—entertained the idea that it might be relevant to appreciating the terms and the purposes of his philosophy. I suspect that there were some who were embarrassed by it—including French intellectuals and including, I suppose, the great majority of the atheists and the religiously indifferent attending the funeral mass. When, five years ago, the New York Times ran a sprawling panegyric introducing Bruno to the American public, the wine connection was mentioned, Catholicism and theological concerns not at all. Yet the point wasn’t missed by everyone. As one Catholic commentator put it just after his death, “the most important Catholic philosopher in the world is dead,” then added “and nobody took notice,” not meaning that his death went unmarked—God knows, the obituaries were legion—but meaning—with only some over-statement—that nobody celebrated Bruno’s philosophy as Catholic. In our field, I noticed only one exception—but a telling one. When the journal Social Studies of Science collected tributes, Donna Haraway acknowledged their shared Catholicism—“as one Catholic … to another,” she wrote—noting that it “says a lot” about how each of them approached “truth-telling in both scientific and religious practices.”
Bruno went regularly to church and took communion—but his religion, like his philosophy, was idiosyncratic. His conception of God was, it’s been said, “immanentist.” Schaffer once tagged him as a “hylozoist,” and “pantheist” might serve as well—God was everywhere, present in all things. Religion is “immanence all the way down and all the way up too,” as Barbara Herrnstein Smith noted. But, in his own words, religion was not to do with “belief.” God was not an entity you believed in: God did not exist outside of the practices—what Bruno called “the processions and rituals” that make Him present. That is, God is made manifest in an actor-network of religiosity. Which is, I think, to say that God is present in Nature and in Us—though, of course, in Bruno’s metaphysics the sorting of the categories of Nature and Us is ultimately in need of linguistic repair. You’ve had the language for centuries, he once told me, give me a few years.
Bruno’s religious focus was, as he often said, on eschatology and soteriology—the Last Days, apocalypse, salvation—the matters portrayed on the Beaune altarpiece. His observance wasn’t a matter of approving priestly sermons and homilies, nor, of course, for Bruno, was it a matter of belief. The Church, he said, had “long been alienated from political, moral, or intellectual innovation.” He found his own way. He was, however, knowledgeable about, and attentive to, what the Church had to say on matters of concern. And the most spectacular instance of this was Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ of 2015. The encyclical came too late to be treated in the Gifford Lectures published as Facing Gaia—though it was footnoted there. Bruno regretted the timing, as he celebrated the pope’s text repeatedly in his last years, especially when addressing Catholic intellectuals. It was a text that drew things together—science, metaphysics, salvation, the climate emergency, the relation between the human and the non-human, the natural and the social.
We are now living in the Last Days—Bruno believed—and he saw the state of Nature as “a real apocalypse,” one whose understanding must be cast in religious terms and the avoidance of which, if it was possible, needed new philosophy, a new ontology, new words to describe what existed and the conditions of its existence. This he found first in Lovelock’s Gaia and then in Laudato Si’. The two were related, and both were related to Bruno’s earlier anti-dualist, anti-modernist sensibilities about the human and the non-human, the natural and the social. The pope’s encyclical described two entities “crying out” in pain—one was Nature and the other was the poor. Francis rejected the great dualisms of modernity much as Bruno did, and he embraced the sensibilities of new environmental science much as Bruno did: “A true ecological approach,” the encyclical said, “always becomes a social approach”; it integrates questions of justice in debates on the environment so as “to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The pope drew together what the cosmology of the seventeenth century had drawn apart; he recognized, Bruno said, “the interdependence of beings that have gradually constituted the provisionally habitable world” in which we live. What is called the Anthropocene is just the recognition of the artificiality of the natural—like Burgundy itself, the land, and the wine. The earth cries out; the poor cry out; the rich think they can run away; the poor know they cannot. The papal joining up of the poor and the natural, the suffering human and the suffering non-human, is recruited as a story about the Anthropocene and about the fragility of the man-made Nature that we have produced and that is about to unmake its makers. It’s no surprise that Bruno so admired the encyclical : in his telling, Laudato Si’ is a Latourian text.
Bruno was a Serious Man. We all think of ourselves and our academic colleagues as serious if we care about competence, truthfulness, contributing to our disciplines, and—an optional extra—to the public culture. But Bruno was Serious in a special sense, Serious in a way that few of us are. The point and purpose of his work were driven by concerns far more consequential than reshaping a discipline or even a set of disciplines. The issue was, indeed, Salvation, pressing the apocalyptic vision and offering a way to avoid the Last Days, if possible. No one can miss the climate crisis apocalypse—and perhaps none of us can count ourselves as Serious in just that way unless our work addresses that crisis—but many choose to ignore Bruno’s framing of the crisis by Christian eschatology.
Bruno’s influence was, of course, enormous—especially in our field—but this influence, I think, has had little to do with his Serious purposes. We liked the engagement with the climate crisis—who could not?—but we’ve had only patchy interest in his views of modernity, and we’ve passed by on the other side of the Christian theology. Instead, we’ve tended to raid Bruno’s writings as a rhetorical treasure trove. And that’s understandable: few of us in STS do metaphysics and few care much about religion. But we’re smitten with rhetoric, more so as our own rhetorical skills have deteriorated—aphorisms replaced by emojis. Barbara Herrnstein Smith didn’t miss the point when she said that Bruno was a “lyrical philosopher.” He often spake in parables. Think of Bruno’s work and you inevitably think of aphorisms, tag-lines, and branded neologisms—“actor-networks,” “factish Gods,” “cycles of credibility,” “centres of calculation,” “amodern-ism,” critiques “running out of steam,” “re-assembling the social,” “matters of fact and matters of concern,” “missing masses”—and the masses of diagrams and line-drawings which literally drew things together. Bruno was by far the most quotable of modern philosophers. He stands in a long tradition of aphoristic philosophers—tracking back to Nietzsche and William James—who skillfully used rhetoric to engage the passions—allusive, playful, enigmatic, paradoxical, oracular. Much of his writing resists analysis while encouraging repetition and undeformed travel. It is often hard to understand but easier to chant. With his death, the intellectual world has lost a formidable thinker—and a great rhetorician. Dominus vobiscum.
This is a little-changed version of a talk given 22 September 2023 at a Harvard University symposium (“Thinking after Latour”) organized to honor the memory of Bruno Latour and to reflect on his work. In order to retain its “as presented” character, there are no references. It also seemed natural throughout to refer to its subject as “Bruno,” whom I knew since the late 1970s, who was a visiting colleague both at the University of California, San Diego, and at Harvard, and who, for many years, I was honored to count as a friend.
[1] A philosophical associate and long-time friend of Bruno’s told me that the academic career was a regarded by the family as a “poor substitute” for the Church—“at least there you can become a bishop.” Bruno’s ambition in academia may have been, the friend said, to show the family that there too one could “achieve great things.” But the family remained indifferent: “I would be very surprised if any of them had the least idea about what he was doing.” Nor does the friend believe that Bruno’s religious preoccupations can be considered “a late return to his family faith.” “I think,” the friend said, “that Bruno’s dream was to achieve what Luther had failed to achieve when breaking with Rome—a reform with continuity.”
[2] I was not present at the Mass: details, including the order of service, were kindly provided by Simon Schaffer.
Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985 [new ed. 2011]; with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996; now translated into 16 languages), Wetenschap is cultuur (Science is Culture) (Balans, 2005; with Simon Schaffer), The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and several edited books.
Featured image: Bruno Latour, Aliança Francesa, Salvador, 2012, CC-BY-NC 2.0, Nelson Oliviera.
