Pandora's Hope

Tracing My Steps

Pandora’s Hope is the last book that I read for this study, and oddly enough, it’s the first book of Latour’s that I wish I had read in a different order in the sequence. The two books I read previous to this one were Rejoicing and AIME, his two most recent publications (or at least the translation of Rejoicing into English was recent), and it just seemed as though Latour was tackling such a different set of questions in Pandora’s Hope, which was published in 1999. Having already read Science in Action, Reassembling the Social, We Have Never Been Modern, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, I felt like I was already familiar with all of the major arguments in this book, although honestly, I felt like these arguments were better articulated in Pandora’s Hope than in some of the others. Essentially, this book didn’t seem like a “natural fit” in the sequence, although one could argue, as Latour himself has, that all of his work over the past thirty years belongs to the same basic project (see “Coming Out as a Philosopher” published in Social Studies of Science). In hindsight, I wonder how it would have changed my understanding of the rest of the books in this sequence if I had read Pandora’s Hope first.

Reading this book first would have been a nice transition between Science in Action (the book of Latour’s I had read most recently before this project) and We Have Never Been Modern (the first book I chose for this sequence). Since one of Latour’s primary goals in PH is to describe how scientific knowledge gets constructed in actual practice, its basic aims and arguments are directly in conversation with those from Science in Action, except that in PH, Latour explores a lot more of the philosophical ramifications of what he and his colleagues in Science Studies are saying. And it is precisely this philosophical orientation in PH that I think would have made reading it a good preparation for WHNBM. When I first read WHNBM, I felt pretty overwhelmed after the first few pages. It seemed like Latour covers so much difficult ground so fast in that book that it took me several readings and conversations with colleagues and professors before I felt like I had a toe-hold. But PH covers much of the same philosophical ground as WHNBM, but it seems (at least to me) to do so at a little bit slower pace and with many more examples. Pandora’s Hope even has a glossary of terms! I feel like I would have been much better prepared for WHNBM if I had read PH first.

If you’re making your way through Latour for the first time, I would recommend reading this book after Science in Action but before WHNBM, and definitely before AIME. But, of course, I should hesitate to give this kind of advice, because part of the reason I started this blog is so that I could read up on other people’s sequencing experiences. I’d be curious to know, for example, where someone might suggest putting Aramis in relation to Pandora’s Hope. What kind of understanding of Latour would come of Science in Action, Aramis, Pandora’s Hope, Factish Gods, for instance? Give it a try!

Description of the Text

Science Studies and Belief in Reality

Pandora’s Hope opens with a little anecdote that recounts an interview that Latour had with a scientist at a conference (the scientist was interviewing Latour). The scientist begins the interview by asking Latour this question: “Do you believe in Reality?” Latour was puzzled at this question, but he was even more bewildered at the look of relief on his colleague’s face when he answered, “Of course.” Odd encounters like this one prompted Latour to write this book. Perhaps a tiny bit of context will be helpful for those who are unfamiliar with Latour’s work and are thinking about choosing Pandora’s Hope as their first encounter with him. Latour belongs (or at least, “belonged” at the time this book was written) to small subgroup/ subfield within the scientific community known as Science Studies. Scholars in the field of Science Studies to not spend a majority of their time doing science, meaning they do not do the work one would typically think of as scientific (laboratories, experiments, etc.). Rather, “science students”, as Latour calls them, study science itself. They study how scientific knowledge works, how it’s made, and how it becomes “real” in the world. Works within the field of Science Studies often seek to uncover all of the various factors, elements, and actors (human and nonhuman) that go into the construction of scientific facts, and these studies often end up challenging some of the most common assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge (i.e. that scientific facts are completely objective, or that they “speak for themselves” or that they are “discovered” in a manner that is free from historical contingency) For an example of a work of Science Studies by Latour, take a look at Science in Action. Anyway, the work of Science Studies has created quite a bit of controversy within the scientific community, even to the point where some scientists have come to accuse scholars within Science Studies as people who are “anti-science”, and even, as the interview described above reveals, “anti-reality.” Latour purpose in Pandora’s Hope is to clear up these misconceptions by providing his definition/ description of what Science Studies is and what it seeks to do.

Essentially, throughout the book, Latour seeks to distance himself (and Science Studies) from two opposite extremes in the philosophy of science. On the one hand, he wants to make it clear that he and his colleagues in Science Studies to not endorse the notion of Science, capital ‘S’. According to this notion of ‘S’cience, scientific “facts” are “discovered” to exist in “Nature” in a way that is completely independent of human subjectivity (My apologies for all the scare quotes, but all of these terms are ones that Latour has a serious problem with, at least the way they’re being used here). This notion of Science relies heavily on distinctions between subjects and objects, between Nature and Society, and between the world “inside” the human mind and the one “outside” of it, all distinctions that Science Studies seeks to undermine. On the other hand, Latour makes it clear that he is also not a disciple of any “social constructivist” theories of scientific knowledge, theories that essentially argue that “facts” are completely constructed by the human subjects, by societies, and by discourse. According to this notion of science, facts only exist within the realm of the human mind, and they lack any correspondence with the “real” world of “objects” that exist “out there.” What Latour wants to point out is that this approach also relies heavily on the distinction between the world inside the human subject and the external world that exists independently of them. Latour wants to do away with this distinction all together, and away with many other distinctions besides. He refuses to choose between “Nature” and “Politics” as the ultimate explanatory framework for scientific truth.

Going back into the history of philosophy, Latour locates Cartesian epistemology as the root of the problems inherent in the Modern Constitution. Once Descartes decided on dualism, and on the maxim “I think, therefore, I am” as his epistemological slogan, he placed the mind “in a vat”, as Latour puts it. And once the mind was in a vat, the only two options that could follow are those that were described in the paragraph above. Either the mind spends all of its time working on a way to bring words (produced by the mind-in-a-vat into perfect correspondence and certain correspondence with the world “out there” (this is what ‘S’cience claims to do), or the mind relinquishes this ambition, and concedes that the only ideas which we erroneously call “truth” are produced only by it (this is what social constructivism argues). For Latour, the notion of a mind-in-a-vat can only lead to these two equally impossible settlements. He would say, “Of course there can be no direct, unmediated correspondence between words and the world. Yet paradoxically (a word that Latour is fine with), he would also say, “Of course it’s not all just made up in our heads, or dictated by society or politics. The world of nonhumans exists, and we can know things about it outside of the prison of discursivity and subjectivity. Society doesn’t determine truth. Society isn’t even a real thing, at least not in the way the Modern settlement conceptualizes it.” Here it starts to become clear why Latour, despite his skepticism toward ‘S’cience, is not a Postmodernist. Postmodernism, as he sees it, still buys into the Modernist Constitution, into the separation between objectivity and subjectivity; it just doesn’t believe that the goals of this Constitution are achievable. It does not seek to supplant Descartes’ epistemological system. It just reverses the agency of truth creation from “Nature” to “Society” (or politics, or subjectivity, etc.). Going back to the question, “Do you believe in Reality?”, we can see now why Latour, from his standpoint as a student of Science Studies, has no problem believing in reality. What else is there to believe in? In fact, it’s not even an issue of belief. Latour argues that the idea that one must believe or not believe in reality is a product of the problems inherent in the Modern Constitution and its equally troublesome poles of epistemology.

Thus, the goal of Pandora’s Hope is to describe a new epistemological framework, one that does away with talk of objects and subjects, of Nature and Society, of inside and outside. For Science Studies there are only humans and nonhumans, a collective (or network) of actors who are co-extensive/ co-creative of one another and of scientific truth. They rely upon one another for their very ontology. Between them are only mediations and translations, but these mediations and translations are the very things that change what these actors are and the role they play in the collective. For the Latour, the best way to demonstrate the “reality” of this new constitution is to follow scientists and engineers in their everyday practices, and this is precisely what he spends the next few chapters of this book doing (Chapter 1 is primarily dedicated to working out the arguments summarized above).

Following Scientists in Practice

In Chapter 2 Latour provides his account of his experiences in the field working with a team of scientists (a botanist, a pedologist, and a geographer) who are working together to determine what is going on in a curious little spot right near the edge of the Amazon forest where the savanna and the forest are swapping characteristics in an odd way. They can’t determine whether the forest is invading the savanna, or whether the savanna is starting to spread into the forest. It is crucial here to pause and explain why (at least in my understanding) Latour would pick this field study as his first empirical episode to describe in this book. It seems to me that the first important characteristic of this study is simply that it is a real-life, practical, “on-the-ground” event that gives us an opportunity to see scientists doing the nitty-gritty work that they do, in the field.

The Amazon forest/savanna study is not a theoretical debate between two philosophers of science, but rather an instance of actual practice. This is science in action. And since Science Studies claims to take an empirical approach to science, an event like this seems an appropriate choice. Another reason that leapt out at me as important is that these scientists are investigating a set of occurrences that have not yet been given an explanation. It is to be determined whether the forest in encroaching on the savanna or the other way around, and this indeterminacy is what can help demonstrate many of the arguments that Latour wants to make about the nature of scientific truth-making. As yet, there are no “facts” in this Amazon study, at least not any that stand alone, outside of any connection or dependency on other facts. It is the facts that these scientists are trying to determine (and yet, of course, when they arrive at their conclusion, the “facts” that they determine will end up being more, not less connected to other facts). Already we can start to see how the two extremes of the modernist settlement are of no use to us in this field study. Science, capital ‘S’, cannot help since the very content that makes up all the truths ‘S’cience only come about after studies like these are already done. “Ready Made Science”, as Latour calls it in Science in Action, is of no help in the middle of scientific controversy and knowledge construction, because, in such cases, it doesn’t even exist yet. But the social constructivist notion of science also is shown to be unhelpful in such field work because the scientists are dealing very closely with nonhumans in the world. They are dealing with plant samples, with clumps of dirt, with animal droppings, not just with discursivity, or political ideology, though of course these things inevitably factor into what the “facts” will or can be. The point is that the soil samples and charts and laboratories cannot be reduced to explanation by human factors.

The more immediate reason that Latour chooses this Amazon field study, however, is that it serves as a depiction of one of the most important characteristics of scientific knowledge that scholars in Science Studies seeks to make visible: circulating reference. Latour wants to trace the ways in which humans and nonhumans interact through the various mediations and translations that make scientific reference possible. He spends most of his time in this chapter carefully describing the ways in which and the specific means by which soil and plant samples are collected, organized, transported, diagramed, charted, and represented in writing. He notes that at each step in a long chain of reference-creation a mediation takes place in which a nonhuman, with the help of humans and other nonhumans, is transformed from one kind of being to another, and then changed again during the next step in the translation. In this process, of course, the humans are changed as well. For example, when the pedologist collects a soil sample with a machine, and then organizes it in a grid alongside other samples, that clump of dirt changes from a clump of dirt out in the forest to a clump that represents something specific as it relates to the other clumps. It transforms from a clump into a sign of something else. Then, of course, it changes again once certain characteristics of these sign-clumps are measured and charted, and then again when they are all written about. The pedologist too changes from a man collecting dirt in the forest to a man with a whole chain of reference to back up his claims. He has entered into and in a sense engineered, though not all alone (humans and nonhumans helped him), a collective of which he is a part, a collective that will be necessary for and determinate of the fate of his claims published in his paper. Latour wants to point out that this is how science works in actual practice. All these mediations and translations take place to create a system of circulating reference that serves to make the study verifiable and retraceable, and yet as these mediations take place, the ontological status of all the actors in the network are always shifting.

Circulating Reference and the Bloodflow of Knowledge

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the task of elaborating on the metaphor or circulating reference introduced in the previous chapter. One of the primary obligations Latour feels he must fulfill is to provide his readers with a new metaphor/ analogy for demonstrating Science Studies’ ideas of scientific knowledge construction. But this new metaphor must be adequate in accounting for all the of various connections scientific claims must make and all the discontinuities it must find its way through (elsewhere in his writing, Latour will refer to this navigation through discontinuities as a pass). Chapter 3 contains Latour’s explanation for why he thinks circulatory blood flow is the appropriate metaphor for visualizing/ conceptualizing how scientific reference must make its passes. In this chapter, Latour expands out from the laboratories of scientific fieldwork and into a discussion of the many other actors in the network that must be negotiated and enrolled into the collective in order for scientific knowledge to be successfully constructed as “real”. As an example from history, Latour chooses the events surrounding the work of Frederic Joliot, a Freinch scientist who made significant strides toward the development of nuclear fission, and subsequently atomic weaponry. Latour shows in this chapter how the development of scientific “facts” is integrally tied to the human world of politics, economics, militarization, etc. It is important to keep in mind here, that while Latour finds all these terms problematic in their traditional usage, and while he rejects the idea that scientific truth is produced by these factors, he would be the first to acknowledge that these factors are always, by necessity, connected to the construction of science. They are part of the network too. They have to be. What Science Studies seeks to do is trace the connections between them and all the other actors, human and nonhuman, in the network. For him to ignore what would typically be called politics would be to commit the sin that Science, capital ‘S’, commits by perpetuating the notion that “facts” are generated in a plane of existence all their own, a plane that is not connected to the human world. Here, I think it’s best to just let Latour speak for himself, since he says it so perfectly: ‘If the traditional picture had the motto “The more disconnected a science is the better,” science studies says, “The more connected a science, the more accurate it may become”’ (p. 97).

Latour uses Joliot as an example of a scientist who really understood how to make the make the necessary connections between actors that he needed to enroll in his network. He made sure the blood flow (to use Latour’s metaphor) of his research passed through all the necessary places in all the necessary ways. Joliot understood how scientific collectives work, and Latour uses his story to illustrate the 5 basic kinds of flow that he argues scientific network must successfully and simultaneously negotiate in order to continue existing as a network. As the “blood flow” of circulating reference moves though and at the same time creates its network, it must pass through these 5 different kinds of negotiation, or as Latour calls them, loops.

The first loop Latour calls “mobilization of the world”, which refers to the ways in which scientists must mediate, organize, and enroll nonhumans in such a way that they bring the world to them. An example of this would be the ways in which the scientists from Chapter 2 studying the Amazon must collect soil and plant samples, they must organize them into a system, and they must draw up charts and tables, etc. so that they can bring the forest to them, so to speak. In other words, scientists must get nonhumans to cooperate with them, and if anything changes in this dynamic of cooperation, the nature of the network will change accordingly. It’s not enough to get political support and private funding for one’s research if the nonhumans in the network cannot be brought into cooperation with one another.

The second loop Latour calls “autonomization”, the activity of enrolling other scientists in the study in order to create a professional network of support. Essentially, if any researcher wants to create “facts”, he must enroll colleagues and create an autonomous discipline within the field, however small it might be. As Latour puts it, “an isolated specialist is a contradiction in terms” (p. 102).

The third loop is that of “alliances”, and this is where the domains typically referred to as politics, economics, and/or industry come into play. The enrollment of interested humans is crucial to the success of scientific research. This is the loop in which industrialists must be made to understand that they can benefit from the research findings from the Amazon studies, or the way the Norwegian manufacturer must be convinced to give “heavy water” to Joliot instead of his competitors in a competing network. The more intricately and integrally a scientist can connect the fate of his nonhumans with the fate of all these other actors, the more successful his research will be, the more “real” his scientific facts will become. Again, the more connected a science, the more real it is.

The fourth loop that circulating reference must make is through the one that deals with public representation. Any scientific endeavor must present itself to the public in such a way that it can ensure support from this crucial part of the network. If the people are convinced, for example, of the value of archaeological research, then they are more likely to vote for politicians who will create alliances along these lines.

To step outside the description of the book for a moment, it seems to me that this element of public representation is playing a crucial role in our world when it comes to such issues as climate change and stem cell research. Because these issues remain controversial in the domain of public opinion, it seems that all the other loops in the blood flow of the network of reference are being affected. It seems that climate scientists would have an easier time enrolling political and industrial allies if the public were demanding that more research be done and policies be implemented regarding these topics. Anyway, let us move on to the fifth and final loop, which Latour calls “links and knots”.

This fifth loop was a little difficult for me to grasp, but let’s see if I can give it a shot. Latour wants to describe with links and knots what he sees as the metaphorical heart of this blood flow of scientific intelligence. This heart is the meeting point that ties all the others together, the place through which all the rest must pass. Now typically this meeting point would be called the “content” of the science, but Latour wants to avoid this word because it suggests the problematic content/ context divide. Comparing scientific networks to the Gordian Knot yet again (he does this often throughout his writing), he says that this “links and knots” loop is the center-point for the whole string, the knot where everything is tied together. If this fifth loop falls apart, all the others are useless. And yet if any of the other four loops stop working, this fifth one will be useless in turn. Perhaps a quote would be helpful here to illustrate the difference he sees between this heart/blood flow metaphor and the traditional metaphor of Science, capital ‘S’: “Science warriors defend the conceptual content of science with the wrong sort metaphor. They want it to be like an Idea floating in Heaven freed from the pollution of the base world; science studies wants to understand it as more like a heart beating at the center of a rich system of blood vessels."

The Co-extensive Nature of Actors

In Chapter 4 Latour moves on to the task of ‘reconfiguring” as he puts it, the notion of how scientific knowledge is “constructed”, or “fabricated”. He realizes that these terms have been quite useful in the parlance of Science Studies, but their use has also led to many misconceptions about what Science Students believe about the nature of reality. It is important to remember that when Latour uses the word “fabricated”, or “constructed”, he is not implying a lack of reality. Just because something is made up, doesn’t mean it’s not real. As Latour says later in his writing, there is a difference between something that is well made and something that is poorly made. Another related part of his project for this chapter is to describe in greater detail the ways in which nonhumans play dynamic roles in the network. He points out that in all the previous chapters, he discussed nonhumans (like the soil samples in Chapter 2 or the atoms in Chapter 3) as if they were always already there, just waiting to be “discovered”, and that once they are discovered, they flow through the loops in the network without changing. Such a notion of nonhumans relies on an assumption that the ontology of these beings is always stable throughout the process of scientific controversy and fact-making. What Latour wants to show is that these actors have an variable ontology of their own, one that is in one sense independent of scientists, while in another sense dependent upon their cooperation, translation, manipulation, and mediation. This might sound like a blatant contradiction to say that these nonhumans have at once independent and dependent ontologies, but what Latour seems to be getting at is that he wants to avoid, again, the errors of the Modern Constitution’s notion of subjects and objects, inside and outside, of Nature and Society. He shows in this chapter that nonhumans are not completely fabricated by human beings in the manner that social constructivism implies that they are. They (nonhumans) have behaviors (dare we say “wills”) of their own that will not change, regardless of what human beings do. In other words, they are real all on their own in a certain sense. But what they really are changes based on the way that humans interact with them. In this Chapter, Latour uses the research and writings of Louis Pasteur to illustrate these points. Take a look at the following quote about how Science Studies approaches Pasteur and his microbes: “…we decided to grant historicity to the microorganisms, not only to the humans discovering them. This entails that we should be able say that not only the microbes-for-us-humans changed in the 1850s, but also the microbes-for-themselves. Their encounter with Pasteur changed them as well. Pasteur, so to speak, “happened” to them” (p. 146).

Latour points out that when Pasteur started his studies on lactic acid fermentation, there was really no such thing a yeast as it is thought of today, as an organism that actually causes fermentation. Pasteur had to adopt a much more flexible set of ontological assumptions about what he was dealing with when he observed the fermentation process. He had to act, to set the stage, so that the yeast could act alone, so that he could then figure out what it was. But in order to do this he had to make a sort of leap into assuming for a moment that it was something so that he could set the stage to see if it really was that something. What exactly he was dealing with was up in the air, both in his laboratory and within the scientific community. Pasteur made yeast able to become visible to the world, and once it became visible, it became something different from what it was when it was invisible.

Articulation, Proposition, and the Spatiotemporal Envelope

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the task of deciding on the best metaphor for how we should describe this process of knowledge/being- making that Pasteur’s experiments demonstrate so perfectly. Latour goes through a whole list of popular candidates for metaphorical vehicles, candidates such as the theatrical metaphor that often employs the word “staging”, the trail metaphor that depicts the scientist on a winding path toward truth, and a whole set of half a dozen or so others. While Latour acknowledges that all of these metaphors have their advantages, he finally lands on articulation and proposition, terms he borrows from Alfred North Whitehead. Latour writes: "They are, first of all, actants, Pasteur, the lactic acid ferment, the laboratory are all propositions…They are not positions, things, substances, or essences pertaining to a nature made up of mute objects facing a talkative human mind, but occasions given to different entities to enter into contact. These occasions for interaction allow the entities to modify their definitions over the course of an event" (141).

Latour argues that what scientists do, and also what is done to them, is articulate propositions (but articulate here is not being used in the linguistic sense). What he likes about this metaphor of articulated propositions is that it stresses the independence of the nonhumans; reveals the two planes at once, it maintains the character of an historical event, and it ties reality to the amount of work necessary for the articulation. What Latour, moving into Chapter 5, argues that scientists do is provide a “spatiotemporal envelope” for the articulation of propositions. While spatiotemporal envelope may sound like a really fancy way of saying “context”, but for Latour, the difference is crucial, because for him, the term spatiotemporal envelope does not depend upon, or maybe better insist upon, the dichotomies of subject/object, inside/outside, Nature/ Society.

Understanding a Network as a Daedalion

In the next few chapters of the book, Latour seeks to further articulate how we are to understand his notion of collectives (or networks) and understand the relationships of agency between the humans and nonhumans in them. The first crucial gesture that Latour makes in this part of the book is to offer a new image for understanding collectives. Encouraging us to abandon the "straight line" image of knowledge (what the Greeks called, episteme), Latour proposes that we think of networks, as well as their evolution, as daedalia , twisted-crooked paths of knowledge (related to the technical know-how type of knowledge that the Greeks called metis). Latour derives this metaphor from the legend of Daedalus and his method for tracing the inside of a snail's shell.

When we look at networks and their evolutions, the daedalion image helps us understand how humans and nonhumans "fold into each other" in such a way that they share in a co-extensive, co-constructive, ontology. For an example of this ontological folding, Latour refers to a man with a gun. Contrary to the slogan from the NRA "Guns don't kill people, people do", and contrary to the opposing argument that places all the agency with the gun, Latour argues that both the gun and the person carrying it are changed by one another. They become a "citizen-gun" and a "gun-citizen".

But humans and nonhumans are not just co-extensive and co-constructive of one another in particular instances, but they also share agency in changing whole collectives, and in determining the way collectives have evolved and continue to evolve. Because Latour refuses to endorse a linear image of epistemology, he is also lead to reject the notion (or "myth" as he calls it) of progress. He proposes that we replace the myth of progress with an alternative myth, one that no longer flows in a straight line, but rather one that is twisted and multi-layered; his word for his new myth is called pragmatogony, a new model for explaining the "genesis of things". The 11 layers of Latour's pragmatogony describe different ways in which humans and nonhumans have been sorted throughout history (although Latour is not thinking of "history" in the strictly linear sense). It would be tedious for me to reproduce for you here, all of these eleven layers, but suffice it to say that Latour is offering a multi-layered myth that follows the complicated trajectory of a daedalion to describe the evolution of collectives.

Latour's Reading of Plato's Gorgias

The next few chapters of Pandora's Hope are dedicated to explaining why the Modern settlement, that framework that seeks pure, linear, objective "knowledge", that framework that insists on all the divides between subject and objects, ever became dominant in the West despite all of its flaws. Latour argues that there are no epistemological reasons for adopting this kind of epistemology. The motives, he argues, are political. Setting up a framework in which Truth is true for all time, in which knowledge must be purified, allows those in control of that knowledge to remain secure in positions of power. There is a sense in which one can understand the purification of knowledge as an endeavor that seeks to clear away all the extra "noise", if you will. Well, Latour would argue that you can't do that in the realm of epistemology without also doing it in the realm of politics. Remember, he does not endorse a priori distinctions between what is scientific and what is political. Thus, for Latour, the very idea of eternal, purified knowledge can be construed as a political weapon that seeks to silence the mob.

Latour demonstrates this point by going back to what he considers the genesis for this kind of epistemology as it is demonstrated in Plato's Gorgias. Latour posits several interesting arguments and readings in this part of the book, but for the sake of brevity, I think it would be sufficient to say that Latour argues that Callicles and Socrates are actually on the same side of their argument. Of course, they differ in their approach to certainty, and to definitions of acceptable public speech, but they both agree, at least implicitly, that the crowd, the rabble in the agora, is a force to be controlled. Callicles argues that you can and should control the mob by influencing them with superior rhetorical power, while Socrates believes you should control them only by appeals to pure knowledge and immortal Ideas. But both men believe that the crowd should be controlled, for they fear the sort of mob rule that would result from a more Latourian epistemology of the collective. Neither of them wants to deal with the complicated twists and turns that comes with tracing networks. Callicles (at least the "straw Callicles) only believes in a sort of Might over Right philosophy that allows the gifted citizen to dominate the others, while Plato offer Right over Might, but does not allow any practical access to this Right because it exists only in an ethereal realm of Ideas. Both men are just reversing the poles of the same construction, much like the Modern relativists and universalists, and the only ones who really end up losing this fight, according to Latour's reading, are the people in the agora (and also their nonhuman co-actants who are also denied a place in the debate).

So, with respect to this reading of Gorgias, we can start to see why Latour insists that there is a political agenda lurking behind the perpetuation of the Modern Constitution. He argues that the reason the Moderns have continued to ignore the contradictions and problems of their supposed but never actually real Constitution is that it does carry with it the distinct advantage of seeing knowledge as controllable, immutable, and "purifiable". In this kind of epistemology, everything is under control. There are only facts, subjects, and objects. Even the people are under control if they can be led to believe in this Constitution, for the notion of immutable, eternal truth only functions as a apparatus for silencing the opposition and maintaining control of any situation. Also, in this epistemology, there is only Nature and Society. In this framework, there are no "factishes", nonhuman actors that are made by us yet somehow go beyond us with their own autonomy (as far as I know, Pandora's Hope is the first place Latour uses the term "factish"). But again, allowing factishes into the Modern epistemology would allow too many variables that might fly out of control; power would start to slip away from those who seek to control knowledge and ontology. I think Latour puts it best in Factish Gods when he's discussing the same basic idea, and it is with this great quote that I'll end this summary:

"There are many good political reasons to believe in the difference between reason and politics."