Latour and After,or What Comes After Latour?

This issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values, published a year after the death of Bruno Latour, offers a collection of four articles reflecting on the unfolding legacy of a foundational thinker in our field. The past year has seen a wave of commemorative work on Latour, including not only obituaries but also wide-ranging personal recollections from those who knew, learned from, and thought with Latour, including scholarly reflections which seek to “play the stranger” and “reflect on what it felt like to read [Latour] for the first time” (Nelson et al. 2023, 174). These manifold and varied accounts highlight the feelings of epistemological and conceptual vertigo often experienced in encounters with Latour’s writing, and the extent to which his vanguard ideas about the social labor of science and fact-making have shaped diverse traditions of STS thought and practice.

Our process of assembling this collection began with a series of conversations. Some took place over video-conferencing platforms during our weekly editorial meetings, some occurred at the 4S meeting in Cholula, and others came over dinner with visiting scholars (turned collection authors). Through these discussions, we found ourselves returning to the energy and appetite for renewal that so frequently characterized Latour’s work and, on the other hand, to our own interest in rethinking what makes “a contribution to and with STS” in this moment (Neale et al. 2023, 6). As Noortje Marres eloquently puts it in her article, Latour is a scholar who understood “how necessary it [is] to renew the categories of political theory, to try out new modes of inquiry, to learn how to think differently.” What would it mean to continue this work in years to come?

We posed this question to the authors of this collection, inviting them to consider what pathways and futures they saw as being enabled by Latour’s work. We oriented them toward what might yet be made of his intellectual creations and collaborations. In doing so, we have tried to honor Latour’s immense forward momentum as well as, as Marres (pers. comms.) phrased it, his “rejection of all things post-.” This choice also informed who we brought into this collection: people who were perhaps a (scholarly) generation “after Latour,” emplaced across several locations, and thus able to speak to the traffic of his ideas across local, transnational, and cultural worlds. Equipped with this brief, and in true Latourian style, the contributors variously reinterpreted and defied their instructions. First drafts circulated. Authors read and responded. In the margins of each other’s texts, and in a lengthy email chain, they engaged in lively exchanges that shaped the collection you now read.

Despite their varying foci, style, and length, there are points of convergence between the four articles. For instance, they all evoke Latour’s physical and intellectual presence, often recalled through memories of shared walks and vivid debate. There is a strong sense of Latour as perpetually in motion. A vibrant particle. Someone equally intellectually, socially, and spatially mobile who was always in transit, always moving on, across one or more of these valences. His writing reflects his characteristic disposition of “jumping and dancing toward the present, away from indifference” (Haraway 2023, 122). In Christopher Kelty’s memorable phrasing, Latour’s work is “more like LSD than food.” Though not always well received, as Jobin and Chen remind us in their essay, his work was propelled by a unique energy—and it is the imprint of this which is felt in this collection.

There is also a levity to the articles in this collection, mirroring the playfulness, drama, and irony that characterized so much of Latour’s own writing (and there is, fortuitously, one classically Latourian diagram). Far from being simple matters of tone, we suggest that these attributes reflect Latour’s own commitment to play and experiment, and following Kelty’s observation, his complementary “refusal to play by the rules of either/or” (see also Jobin and Chen, this issue). We suggest that this is a legacy of the field’s foundational generation that has perhaps been marginalized or neglected in contemporary STS writing, though not from its teaching and myriad making and doing experiments.

Meanwhile, in this collection, we find that the companion to playfulness is often a deep respect that declines reverence. There is no hagiography. Latour’s ideas are here to be pushed, challenged, and put to difficult work. Why does his later work on the planetary not better confront the bifurcation between representational politics and everyday material politics, as Marres asks, thus reproducing the confounding need for “a heroic subject to unify us at the heart of political democracy”? What are we to do, Moreira wonders, with the weakly defined new actors, entities, or relations struggling to participate in “ontological pluralism”? How to align, as Jobin and Chen ask, the postnational vision of Gaiapolitics with the defense of national sovereignties in worlds at war? A posthumous collection may seem a strange place for such critical engagement, yet these contributions convince otherwise. We would argue, in fact, that such frictions and tensions are what sustain the liveliness of Latour’s thought and allow others to sketch new paths forward with it.

Latour published little in this journal over his lifetime, and we realize that by staging this collection we are, in some sense, not simply making a claim on behalf of this publication but also making a disciplinary claim on his work as fundamentally contributing to and with STS. Further, Latour is not the only luminary of the field to have passed in recent years. He is one among others who were instrumental in creating the institutional and conceptual infrastructures we call STS, and who are no longer with us.

In closing, we want to draw a connection between the questions we put to the contributors of this collection and the questions we put to journal contributors and scholars in the field more broadly. What comes after? After the recent past and the fleeting present? After the disciplining and solidification of the field? For us, this is a timely moment to reflect on the breadth of ambition across the field, to hold open possibilities for what it might yet become, and not to preserve a particular version of it. “We are not bored, we are not despondent,” said Latour (1993, 387) himself, “What an extraordinary field is ours!”