Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment

by Mara J. Prieto and Elise S. Youn

Bruno Latour is a social scientist whose writings and
collaborative work mediate between the fields of sociology,
anthropology, science, technology, art and architecture. He
emphasizes experimentation as a tool for decoding the
connections between the human and non-human world. In
his latest book, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the
Sciences into Democracy (2004), he argues for a rethinking
of political language around what he terms attachment
and "critical proximity," that is, the notion that people and
things are intimately connected through politics.
On a recent visit to Columbia University, Latour spoke to
us about an exhibition he is curating at the Zentrum fr
Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe,
Germany (Figure 1). Entitled Making Things Public, this
project was inspired by Pragmatism, which stresses experimental testing and trusting in
the world. As Latour puts it, we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and
technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated
through the perspective of material history.
Q: What is the goal of the Making Things Public exhibition? What are the intentions
behind it?
BL: The aim of the Making Things Public exhibition is to try to assemble different
ways of assembling. The show explores the idea of an assembly of assemblies, or
more exactly, an assemblage of assembling, different ways of gathering things
together.
There is no overarching party line in the show, even though what we are trying to do is
very clear. The exhibition is more or less an opportunity to share my views about
modernism. The different accumulations of things that are assembled are connected not
by the top, as if they were all part of a huge, overall scheme, but by the bottom. They
are connected by the fact that they are all techniques of representation. These techniques
are necessary if you want to approach representation in the triple sense of science,
politics and art. As techniques of representation, there is something that they all have in
common. Indeed, we are just as interested in the structure of financial markets as we are
in listening to religious sermons, creating post-political spaces in the classical sense
of the word, or even learning how to build architectural models (we have a small part in
the exhibition on this by OMA).
The aim of the show is to open up the repertoire of political attitudes and affairs. We are
trying to steer the debate in a slightly different direction, one that is very inspired by the
American tradition of Pragmatism. The main work of art apart from the architectural
installation done by the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia is an invisible
work of art called the phantom Body Politic. It is a sort of materialization of Walter
Lippmanns argument concerning the notion of the phantom public. It is actually a

virtual work of art that will surround the whole exhibition, like political bodies
surrounding us. We cannot see it, but we feel its effects. We want to try to do a visual,
artistic re-presentation of what the body politic is in this Pragmatist tradition.
To answer the second part of your question, our intention is basically to regain
confidence in mediation after the time of critique. My argument is that critique as a
repertoire is over. It has run out of steam entirely, and now the whole question is, how
can we be critical not by distance but by proximity?
The exhibition includes examples of many different techniques of representation most
of which seem to have very few connections to each other in the 2500-meter-square
space of the ZKM. It will push us to ask why all of these techniques of representation
are connected to one another. The visitor is supposed to see the connections between
these techniques.
When we usually think of politics, we
think only of a very small series of
attitudes that suppose a gathering of
people around the question of the
representation of people. These
perspectives have little to do with things
, nor are they related to other ways of
gathering. The only thing we want from
the visitors is for them to recognize that
there are many other ways of
assembling, and that most of this
assembling this politics is about
things. If you turn the things around,
you get a different type of gathering and
agreement, or dissent, which you dont
have in the classical definition of political philosophy.
Q: In your proposal for the Making Things Public exhibition, entitled, A Parliament
of Parliaments, How to Overcome the Crisis of Representation, you write, we want
to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based
on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material
history. How can individual architects and artists take part in the process of producing
assemblies to explore a new future, while facing the modern duality that you describe
in your book, We Have Never Been Modern? This duality is defined as the separation
between nature and society.
BL: It is not a show about modernism per se. Although it is inspired by my argument
that modernism is not the future of humanity, it is not specifically about that question. It
is actually about a much simpler question: if we are dealing with matters of concern
and my argument tries to decode the shift between matters of fact and matters of
concern if we are moving in this direction, which seems to be obvious, although we
dont have to buy the whole argument from the anthropology of science about matters
of fact and matters of concern what are the aesthetics of this shift? What are the
politics of it? In stylistic, artistic terms, these are the questions I want to raise in the
show.

Now, why are architects involved? Architects have always been involved with these
sorts of questions. We have a very nice sub-exhibit in the show that is a small
reconstruction of Otto Neuraths Isotype work in Vienna (1924-1934), from the time
of the great modernist moment of logical positivism and the Bauhaus. I want to show
the Isotype work as the perfect example of the link between the philosophy of
science, logical positivism, architecture, the Bauhaus, aesthetics and social politics. I
want to take the Isotype argument not to criticize it, but to say that it was an
interesting event a great, important moment for architecture and the philosophy of
science, stylistically. However, it is not the moment in which we are right now. Now,
we still see the connection between architecture, the philosophy of science, politics,
statistics, social responsibility and so on, except there are no matters of fact as a bedrock
on which to construct a perfectly pure style, a perfectly pure philosophy of science, a
perfectly pure socialist politics, etc.
So I want this small exhibit on Neurath to ask everyone in the show, can you do better
than Neurath? This is really a stylistic question: can you do better than the Bauhaus,
the logical positivists, the socialists, and those who were interested in the statisticalaesthetic connection? Of course its a grand question, and its just an exhibition; its
just 2500 meters square, and the budget is very small, but that is the question Im
interested in tackling.
Architects are also in the show in many other places. There is one exhibit on the
architecture of parliaments themselves, as well as another on scale models. This exhibit
on scale models is by OMA and tries to answer the question, how do people utilize
scale models to understand architecture? So architecture is present in many areas. In
terms of art history, the transformation of churches into temples is also featured in a
sub-exhibit. However, architecture is significant because it is the constant metaphor
about what it is to live in a common space. For instance, the dome is an architectural
metaphor. This stylistic question can only be approached from a multidisciplinary point
of view with philosophy, politics, sociology, design and of course architecture.
In the way it deploys these objects, the exhibition itself has to represent this
multidisciplinary question. It wont resolve it, but it will re-present the question. That is
why its a very integrated exhibition. Everything that is in the show resonates with
everything else. No one is allowed just to put something there and then isolate it from
everything else. All of the projects are connected to each other, and because of this, they
are also all in flux.
We are imagining a very fluid show because we are assembling things that have never
been assembled together. These assemblies do not yet exist for the most part. Its not
like a normal show where you present things that already exist, and you bring them
together for display in a museum. Here nothing exists yet. Apart from Cranachs
painting, which is already painted, everything else is being made expressly for the show
on a shoestring budget, and mostly by people like me complete amateurs who have
never done this sort of thing before.
Q: You write that one of your goals for the ZKM exhibition is to invent new
procedures, forms, shapes, and sites to dramatize the public space to literally, re-present
them anew. In what way can the architect create new procedures that encourage

public interaction and criticism? How can the architect serve effectively as a mediator to
engage the public in the creation
process as co-designers?
BL: I cannot speak for the architect, but
I can see why, metaphorically,
architecture is important for building a
common world. Practically speaking, I
can also see that people should be
enjoying the different parts of the show,
no matter if they prefer the piece by
OMA, the exhibit on the models of
different parliaments, or the
architectural intervention that the
Columbia students are proposing
(Figure 2). All of these projects are
about the obvious interactions between
space, things and common assemblies.
Literally all architecture is about this
question of the common world.
Then the question is, which type,
which style of architecture is adjusted
to the task? We have a whole style of
architecture designed around the notion
of matters of fact and the notion of
objects: modernist architecture. What is
the successor to this style of modernist
architecture? I am interested in pushing
the designer into asking, if you have to
imagine that the world does not consist of matters of fact, but instead of matters of
concern, what happens with the concepts of function, sobriety, public space, etc.? I am
interested in trying to push the architect towards thinking about these issues.
Q: What is the responsibility of the architect in the process of making things? There
seems to be a trend in architecture right now in which there is less interest in the
architect engaging the public in a socio-political sense than relying on computergenerated systems and imagery. We see the emphasis you place on the thing, the end
product (rather than on the individual and his choices) as a potential method of escape,
as an excuse for the architect to avoid involving the public or dealing with sociopolitical considerations. Is there a way that you could clarify your concept of making
things to ensure that the architect remains a critical agent?
BL: It is not just about making things; rather, it is about making things public. At the
same time, if people want to escape their social responsibility, they are going to find a
way. The question is not actually to insist on social responsibility at all not because
the exhibition is apolitical, but because the classical definition of politics is very
narrow. The whole idea of the show is actually to say that there will be very little
involved about politics in the sense of a conventional repertoire of demonstration,
indignation, order and power.

Of course, all of these things are very important, but politics in the sense of assemblies
of things and attachments to things is a much larger set. My understanding is that the
crisis of representation is largely due to the fact that people define politics in too narrow
of a sense; that is, it is always defined in terms of race, gender, power and class relations
a very limited repertoire. These relationships are important of course, but they are
somewhat restrictive and carry too little of what the thing in its attachment really is. In
fact, this position, which is the reiteration of political responsibility and social
discourse, is actually apolitical. It is critical and can help someone feel good, but it does
not necessarily propose an entry into the construction of the collective.
I have indeed done a lot of research in this area in the past, but I think the crisis of
representation today occurs because it is very difficult to speak about the production of
things with this limited repertoire. This repertoire blocks you at the entry of science and
technology, and architecture is part of science and technology.
If I understand the question, you are worried that the interest in things will demobilize
the masses, so to speak. Is that right?
Q: Well not the masses generally, but architects specifically, if they are so focused on
producing things, which seems to be the case.
BL: Things are not objects. In fact, things are precisely the opposite of objects. When
we are focused on things, we are actually also focused on ourselves. When I am
focusing on the attachment of this coffee cup, I am actually getting back to myself quite
fast, as well as to the entire history of Italian coffee-making, the people who are
harvesting the coffee, etc. This cup of coffee is an assembly. In the exhibition, for
example, we have shopping carts that are made from different products, so these
shopping carts are in fact political assemblies as well.
If you are interested in things, you are precisely not being limited to objects that is the
difference. To arrive at the thing, you are proliferating in all sorts of places that do not
of course look political in the traditional sense of the word, but they certainly do not
look like objects either, in the same sort of isolated, bounded ways that have so often
fascinated modernists. That is exactly the point of style. There is something in the
object that is detached from the background and foreground and that has a much
narrower definition of what it is to be connected to the world.
Q: There is another trend in architecture towards using the self-organizing system to
generate a formal language. Software programs such as Maya allow the architect to plug
in a set of coordinates in order to generate instantly a form that is then placed onto the
site. What is your opinion of the use of artificial self-organizing systems both in
architecture as well as in the social sciences?
BL: I dont know enough about this software, although I am very interested in it.
Actually, for the exhibition I am looking to understand what the visual display of things
is, instead of what the visual display of objects is. First, all of these methods are very
old from what I understand. The idea of self-organizing systems was invented in the
16th century. It is nothing new.

I am from Beaune in Burgundy, which is the birthplace of Gaspar Monge, the inventor
of descriptive geometry. All of these computer-based visualizations are basically faster
versions of descriptive geometry. The world in which the object is made to move is a
modernist world from beginning to end.
So it is not as if you are talking about a new world with self-organizing systems, on the
one hand, and CAD-based designs on the other. You are actually still in an old world
the very old world of modernity where objects move without being transformed. They
are instead geometrically manipulated or projected. With this kind of projection, you do
not move an inch out of the modernism framework. You are still focused on the object
rather than the thing.
A new beginning would be in contrast to the world of objects were imagining now
about how the architect displays a thing, which in an architectural project would mean
to draw connections between where you would simultaneously see the people of the
neighborhood criticizing the project, where you would see the costs, the pollution, the
asbestos removal in the building, etc. As an architect, using this kind of visualizing
software, you would be able help people figure out this non-modern space on your
computer.
Q: With Maya, there are many different approaches to design, many different factors
you can input. For instance, you can design a weather system.
BL: Is this what you call non-standard architectures?
Q: Yes, it is related to that exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It has to do with
artificially creating natural systems such as weather, and with expecting unexpected
things to happen based on the self-generating systems created by the computer program.
There is also an interest in trying to build formal chimeras using this kind of computergenerated design.
BL: What you are describing seems to be the same as 16th-century Baroque design.
This kind of architecture is based on anamorphosis, on the whole imagination of the
modernists. The Non-Standard Architectures exhibition that took place in Paris is
completely modernist. It is about formalism, mastery, self-organization, and
anamorphosis. In addition to that, I found the architecture exhibited in the show terribly
ugly. Non-standard architecture represents a monstrous kind of formalism. It seems to
me to be much more related to some sort of late Archimboldo anamorphosist invention
than anything that is related to matters of concern.
However, I want to return to this issue of matters of concern. Why am I interested in the
work you do at Columbias Graduate School of Architecture? Precisely because I am
hoping that you can deliver to me at the ZKM in Karlsruhe a space that begins to
resemble the spatial requirement of this new non-modernist language. That is really
what I am interested in.
And since there has been this discussion about Manhattan post-September 11th, can you
retranslate this discussion in a visual vocabulary and grammar that can then serve to
teach us a lesson independent from the final result which will allow us to understand
that we are really entering another world, not the Baroque world of anamorphosis,

mastery, formalism, and matters of fact? The world is not made of these categories.
Nevertheless, we still need the visual tools; we need CAD to design; we need these
methods. But why should we limit ourselves by leaving modernism to amorphism?
Amorphism is the post-modern version of a crisis. It tells us, lets have no shape. No,
the collective has to have a shape a very strong one but this shape has to be
invented.
Q: Rem Koolhaas is considered one of the most political figures in architecture today.
Yet, he seems to be a strategist who adapts himself and his work according to the global
market, rather than acting as a critical mediator. What do you think of the way Koolhaas
has defined the role of the contemporary architect, both as a master architect and as a
role-model for the younger generation?
BL: I cannot answer that last part because I am not an architect. It so happens that I
know Koolhaas fairly well because I have two students one of whom has studied with
him and the other who is working with him and so I have met him several times. I
think that one of his important aspects is that he is like me said to be cynical,
because he is not politically correct, in the sense of simply articulating the critical
idiom. So he is often accused of being complacent and conniving with market forces, as
if he were sort of enjoying this kind of power in architecture.
I think this is a very silly critique of him because more importantly, Koolhaas is a
perfect example of the difference between having a political stance and being interested
politically. Of course he does not have a political stance in the sense that he does not
say what he is supposed to say or what makes people feel good which is that market
forces are dominated by late capitalism. Compared to people who do say these things,
he looks conniving and complacent.
However, his way of handling the question of non-modernism, second modernism
or hypermodernism, as he may call it, is highly political because it produces
architecture (such as the CCTV Headquarters Building in China) and books (such as
Mutations, which I find very interesting as a sociologist, and The Harvard Design
School Guide to Shopping) that recognize the presence of politics. These works are ten
times more interesting, for instance, than dozens of other works done by sociologists of
the city and of markets.
Take The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping; there are hundreds of books (by
Walter Benjamin, etc.) lamenting the consumption and the Americanization of the
world. But what Koolhaas has produced is much more interesting, even in terms of
science and data than all of these lamentations over the power of the market, because he
is interested in attachment.
It is something like a new realism that is part of an engagement with the future. Of
course it does not look politically correct because it does not pay respect to the very
small number of categories you already have.
Now since I am not an architect, I cannot offer a critical opinion about his architecture. I
find that Koolhaas buildings are often ugly, but I know he likes them to be like that. I
am not an architect, but as a social scientist, I can tell you that the series of books he did
are masterpieces.

Q: Like Koolhaas, you are said to be somewhat of a cynic. Yet there is also a tone of
idealism in your work, in terms of how recognizing the politics in things can open up
new ways of thinking and being critical. Also, your ideas are clearly related to
Pragmatist theory and the interest in trusting in the world, in testing out your ideas
through doing and making things. However, as you mentioned earlier, there is a
difference between simply making things and making things public, or actually
engaging people to create something public and constructive. How does your work try
to negotiate this difference? What is the goal of your work?
BL: What is common between Koolhaas and me, if I dare say so, is experimentalism.
The political sphere is not yet composed; it has to be composed. The common world is
not made; it has to be made. There is no authority that has the definition of the common
good; it has to be experimented upon. Where are the experimental tools? What is the
public demonstration? How do we prove these positions?
I think that is where the Pragmatist outlook in politics is just starting. Intellectually, the
current interest in Pragmatism raises an important point: why did Lippmann and Dewey
create such an interesting definition of politics in 1930, and then we waited 70-80 years
to recover it? What happened in between? What happened in between was the
introduction of a completely authoritarian definition of politics from the right with
economic cybernetic systems theory and also from the left with the whole rise and
demise of Marxism. Now back to Pragmatism, if you read Lippmanns book, The
Phantom Public (Library of Conservative Thought), it is as fresh as if it were just off the
press. If you read Dewey, it is amazing how contemporary it seems.
I think we have become interested in Pragmatism again because the public continues
to be a problem. The public is not what is meant simply by a certain definition of the
common good. If you speak about it in terms of a common good, then you have to find
the experiment that makes it work. Where is the experiment that proves that you are
right? If you decide you can define what is good for Americans or good for architects,
for instance, where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of the demonstration.
Decode this protocol. Engage politics, not in the sense of feeling good and having the
right set of political positions and so on, but around the protocol of debriefing the
collective experiment.
In that sense, to come back to Koolhaas, I find a great resonance in what Koolhaas has
done in his book on the development of Chinas Pearl River Delta, Great Leap
Forward. It is a monstrous experiment, but this experiment is decoded in a book that is
much more interesting than all the whining and criticizing about the modernization of
China. In that sense, Koolhaas is involved in debriefing the collective experiment. This
is also precisely what I am trying to do in my own work and in the Making Things
Public exhibition.
Bruno Latour is author of Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), We Have
Never Been Modern (1993), Paris: Invisible City (2004), and Politics of Nature: How to
Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). He has taught at the Centre de sociologie de
l'Innovation at the cole nationale suprieure des mines in Paris since 1982. Together
with Peter Weibel, he was the curator of Iconoclash (2002).

"Making Things Public" will open at the ZKM Karlsruhe in March 2005. For this event,
Columbia University's Center on Organizational Innovation and the Graduate School
of Architecture, Planning and Preservation have been working together with Latour to
design an installation that deals with the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan.
Posted by agglutinations at July 5, 2004 12:00 AM
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