Abstract
In this interview, Vinciane Despret discusses the importance of Bruno Latour to her work. In particular, she addresses the questions of methodology. She examines why it is necessary to invent a new method for each new object we study and how we can become more attentive as scientists, especially those specialising in ethology, to the ways in which humans and non-humans are interested in each other. Finally, Despret considers how we can inherit from Bruno Latour’s work for our future thinking.
Like Bruno Latour, the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret interrogates fundamental concepts like ‘society’, ‘self’ and ‘other’. Her innovative ethological methodologies in animal studies and the environmental humanities elaborate the practical ways in which humans can engage with nonhumans, thereby transforming each other. In this process, other worlds emerge and take shape, demanding that humanities, as much as the sciences, take notice. In this interview, she critically discusses scientific ways of addressing nonhuman others, specifically in ethology, in order to provide a much fuller account of nonhuman intelligences and sensitivities. Bruno Latour is particularly significant in this context because, throughout his work, he proposed ways to honour the ontological make-up and modes of operation of the various entities he engaged with (whether in sciences, technology, law, religion or fiction). Like Despret, he gave weight to the attachments we form with nonhumans and provided a detailed account of these crucial relations. In this interview, Despret discusses the importance of Latourian pragmatics to her own thinking and to future environmental philosophies. She shares with Latour, and other colleagues like Isabelle Stengers, a neo-pragmatic philosophical orientation which makes creative departures from the American tradition, aligning it with urgent matters that concern us today. In her work, she concentrates on the human-animal relationships – an area of research that was left unexplored by Latour – and this focus obliges her to extend and adapt Latourian methods so they can bring to light the specificities of human-animal encounters. The interview traces the transformation of Despret’s pragmatic methodology, touching various subject matters over the years. The conversation that served as the basis for this interview took place online on 2 May 2024.
A few colleagues and friends have been influential in your work, most notably Isabelle Stengers, but here I would like to ask specifically about Bruno Latour, whom we lost, sadly, in October 2022.
One of my books, Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau [When the wolf dwells with the lamb] (Despret, 2020), really was dedicated to Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. With this book I was thinking of them both and they are extremely present, in one way or another, in this text. The chapter on crows was actually dedicated to Bruno Latour, and it was almost like a postcard to him. He was very ill at the time. It was at the end of the ’90s that he had his first bout of cancer, and I knew he was very ill and very fragile. I wanted so much to tell him of all the love I had for him, all the love he had given me.
But that wasn’t the only reason for dedicating this chapter to him. And it’s no coincidence that a later book, Living as a Bird (Despret, 2021b), is also explicitly dedicated to him (as well as to Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers). For these two writings, the chapter on crows and the book on bird territory came from the same impulse, that of celebrating the work of scientists who make their birds fascinating. And to celebrate this work by striving to describe it as meticulously as possible, paying attention to all the details involved in their practices. It was this gesture that I had already begun to learn from Latour in the very first book on birds, the one on the Arabian babblers in Israel. This book, The Dance of the Arabian Babbler (Despret, 2021a) is well worth a look. I had gone out into the field in the early 1990s to observe ornithologists observing birds whose descriptions seemed to me a little astonishing: babblers didn’t behave like the other birds I had found described in the scientific literature. They had very sophisticated social behaviors, and Zahavi, the ornithologist who was observing them, claimed that they were motivated by questions of prestige, that they had to resolve complex social dilemmas, that the gifts they gave each other and the fact that they danced together were in response to these motives, etc.
I should point out that I’d started out with some very bad questions, to do with ‘representations’, typical questions of the time for the ‘philosopher in practice’: how do scientists’ representations influence what they observe? How do scientists project onto birds? Because, I thought, if this bird is extraordinary, whereas the others in the literature were not, it was obvious, in the traditional conceptions that were still guiding animal research at the end of the ’80s, beginning of the ’90s, that it was because the scientists had projected their own anthropomorphisms, their own complicated motivations.
Obviously, everything I discovered in the field wildly resisted these questions and interpretations, and I could see that. But I was there, I had to investigate: so I forgot my inadequate questions, I took lots of notes, I observed the birds, I asked lots of questions of the ornithologists. At the end of the field trip, I found myself with notebooks full of things I didn’t know what to do with, because they didn’t answer any questions. On my return, I was lucky enough to come across Stengers’ Invention of the Modern Sciences (2000). In this book, I discovered two things: firstly, the possibility of beginning to articulate what I had experienced; and secondly, the existence of Latour’s work.
On the one hand, I began to find, in Isabelle Stengers’ writings, answers to the crucial questions that I was bringing back from the field, namely the fact that I was dealing with practices that ‘produce existence’, both that of the objects being questioned and that of the scientists observing them. It was on the basis of this insight that I could ask these ornithologists, and their birds, to testify: they had become, with each other and through each other, interesting. Secondly, in the very first lines of her book, Isabelle Stengers mentioned the work of Bruno Latour – her book was in fact a response to We Have Never Been Modern, published in French two years earlier. Once again, in reading Latour, I found the questions that what I was discovering in the field responded to, and would enable me to articulate everything I had learned and observed. And not only that.
First of all, let’s put ourselves back in the context of those times: interest in animals was low, and confined either to the books of anti-speciesist activists (with whom my work had no connection), or, with very rare exceptions, to work on the ‘study of mentalities’ type or on human representations of animals – work which could not be said to be really interested in animals. In short, the field was still divided between the natural sciences (those who study animals) and the humanities (those who study the way in which humans perceive animals, and who can therefore denounce the way in which scientists’ ‘representations’ contaminate their knowledge).
But what Bruno Latour was proposing was radically new in this respect. Not only did this division not hold (and was of no interest to him), but Latour gave unprecedented legitimacy to the idea of considering non-humans not as ‘representations’, but as actants. It was no longer a question of seeing them in symbolic schemas, in systems of representation, but of studying, seriously and rigorously, how, for example, those speaking for them make them exist, make them matter – how, to use Latour’s (2001) expression about Thelma Rowell’s sheep, these scientists ‘give animals a chance’, by allowing them to break out of already pre-written scripts. With all the work this requires, all the imagination, all the wisdom and, above all, how these non-humans themselves manage to actively compel this consideration. In reading Latour, I could then understand, and recount, how all these exciting things we’re learning about babblers could have been discovered, and I could understand and relate it, by carefully describing the work of the scientists who had succeeded in getting these birds to bear witness to what interests them and to what mobilizes them in their social life. Let’s note in passing that Latour not only offered legitimacy to our interest in non-humans; he simultaneously gave us the legitimacy to practise a philosophy of science in the field: ‘Don’t just listen to what scientists say, go and see what they do. That’s where they’re interesting’.
Back to the chapter on crows in Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. This chapter is really something that I wrote thinking: ‘I’m giving Bruno a gift, I’m showing him everything he taught me, everything he’s teaching us. I can put it into practice, I can put it to the test in the field and it gives us something very joyful, that teaches us lots of things.’ In this chapter, what I think I’ve tried to do is take up the gesture Latour taught me and do it with all the meticulousness he strove for in his work. Pay attention to the details of practices, to the stages of translation, don’t skip any steps, ‘give an account’.
In a way, and this was the reason for my choice, the work of crow specialist Bernd Heinrich seemed to me to have been ready-made for a Latourian description. Heinrich’s investigation into why crows call their fellow crows when they’ve found food (rather than keeping it for themselves) is a real adventure. With each question solved, others open up, complicating the problem. We go from enigma to enigma, working out different devices [dispositifs] for each problem, with a whole chain of translations, and, wonderfully, a progression of interest as we go along: the crows get more and more complicated, more and more ‘recalcitrant’. They demolish one theory after another, and their investigator himself becomes more and more captured by the problems they pose, and more and more interesting himself. The crows had – and here it’s a Latourian gesture that I could attempt by following this adventure in this mode – ‘enlisted’ their investigator in their array of increasingly remarkable skills.
And I followed this adventure by paying close attention to the way in which the crows are authorized, by the scientist, to take a position in relation to the questions and hypotheses put to them: each of Heinrich’s devices was constituted as a suggestion for an activity to the recipient of the questions. Through these stratagems and devices, the researcher commits himself to more activities in order to elicit more activity from the birds he is observing (Latour, 1999). In other words, Heinrich is looking for every possible way to activate the crows around his problem in the same way that he allows himself to be activated by those he studies. To know is to explore a regime of authorizations and ‘enabling’. This is where Latour brings me back to Deleuze’s definition of ethology: it’s a practical science of powers, a practical science of what beings are capable of. And Latour has me twist this definition slightly: it’s also the practical science of what beings make each other capable of.
May I ask more about methodology? With you, it’s a bit special. Not only do you ‘go and see for yourself’, avoiding the beaten track of science and philosophy, but you also ask those you study to guide you through the process. For example, in Our Grateful Dead (Despret, 2021c), you talked about a storytelling method: forming narrative matrices, a phrase that struck me was assuming that each story engages the next, and so on. It’s a method that involves following rather than explaining.
What Bruno taught us, and which is very important, I remember a lecture Bruno gave at a university in Belgium, when I had just met him, and he told us: ‘First, you have to learn to be stupid’ – he was talking about supermarket trolleys. How do you return them? How do you make people take them back? We all had explanations. I can’t remember exactly what question he was asking, but at one point he said: ‘No, no, you have to learn to be stupid again’ – in other words, go back to the basics. I think it’s really interesting, the way he asked us to go back to the most concrete and descriptive things.
Like ‘The Berlin Key’ (Latour, 1991).
Yes, like ‘The Berlin Key’. If there’s something in common, it’s not really with networks, it’s more with Bruno’s pragmatics, which is to describe, describe and describe, i.e. to go back to the work of the most meticulous description, to pay attention to all the details and stick to the concrete. Philosophers always tend to want to go straight to concepts. No, no, let’s stick with reality, let’s go there and see how far we can go with these descriptions. That was an important point. Each time I did research, I had to invent a new method, because the problem that arose didn’t fit into the established methodologies.
But I think you raise an important point about my work with those left behind. It was Antoine Hennion, the sociologist, one of Bruno Latour’s colleagues, who once said to me: ‘In the end, what you succeeded in doing with Our Grateful Dead is to make the subject very banal.’ This is astonishing. There’s nothing worse for an author than being told that what you’re doing is banal, yet this becomes a compliment! You’ve managed to do something banal with something that wasn’t banal.
Antoine Hennion’s remark touches on a crucial aspect of this research, which is its methodology. I think the banality comes from the fact that I didn’t ask any questions, and that it was simply the fact that I was announcing my intention to start this investigation that got people talking to me and telling me stories. This is the methodology I finally chose: staying at the pre-investigation stage. When I think about it, I realize that this method itself may have had a trivializing effect. I’m probably going to say it a bit hastily, too summarily, but the fact of asking questions often expresses an anomaly, or an astonishment (you don’t ask questions about things that are taken for granted, in most cases). So if you ask people (and I’m not the only one to realize this [seeBennett, 1999]) whether they have relationships with their deceased, in an environment where such experiences are not very legitimate, you’re going to arouse their mistrust, on the one hand, but above all, in a way, you’re highlighting the anomaly of these experiences, you’re making them unusual experiences. In short, the question can have a stigmatizing effect. I believe that the pre-investigation method, which makes people your collaborators rather than your respondents or informants, may have had a trivializing effect, if only in the sense of destigmatization.
In fact, it was a matter of following people in the way they themselves ask questions, without imposing my own – and in the way they themselves divide up what is real and what might not be, or might be in another sense, in another regime of truth – yet another way of being pragmatic, of paying attention to the way people are sensitive to various modes of existence and, no doubt, of being less asymmetrical. And this implies telling, relaying, not pretending to explain, after the fact, what people have proposed to you. Hence narrative matrices, stories that shed light on each other, defusing any attempt at explanation.
What do you think is important to inherit from Bruno Latour’s work, or to pass on for future thinking?
I think I can answer by extending that last question and returning to the question of research tools in a more general way. I’m thinking here of Bruno Latour’s diplomatic gesture, the idea of always questioning how we address those who hold something dear (and even questioning them on what they are prepared to modify to continue that relationship). What I’d like to see extended is Bruno’s very special approach: paying very close attention, and attributing importance very rigorously, to what we value. And to go through the process. For me, this isn’t a moral problem, it’s an epistemological and political one, which is why I have coined the term ‘the politeness of getting to know’ to describe the practices of the scientists I admire, and on which I try to align my own practice. Not just not destroying what people hold dear, but, on the contrary, building on that to explore questions with them. In all his inquiries, Bruno has, each time, invented a new methodology, a new tool, because an inquiry only makes sense if it finds its strength, or strengths, in what moves people, in what makes them think, in what interests them and makes them interesting. If I had to sum it up, it’s taking a position that I try to honour, and which is my way of inheriting it: the position of the apprentice. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that’s the position I found myself in right from the start of my research. For my first fieldwork on the Arabian babbler, it was a case of being an apprentice. I’m with a zoologist who knows these birds very well, but I don’t understand them, I don’t know them, I don’t understand what I’m seeing, and I don’t know what to do. In a way, the only thing you can do in that case is just be there, listen and try to learn at the same time as the others, knowing that there are lots of things you don’t understand.
I think Bruno Latour taught me that – I hope I’m not mistaken, and I don’t want to offend his memory – because that’s what he seemed to be putting into practice. Trust, not in a general way, but through addressing others on the basis of what they value, what’s important to them, what’s vital to them, addressing ‘amateurs’, in the sense he cultivated the term. This is how he succeeded, with Isabelle Stengers, in making us love the work of scientists when they do what they do well, just as he did with jurists, with technologies, and those with whom he did a co-inquiry in the After Lockdown project (Latour 2021: 78–83).
One last thing, more personal, but related to this: Bruno would sometimes say to me, in connection with my investigations, ‘Look, this is what you are doing’ [Tiens, voilà ce que tu fais]. And often, I didn’t know it, or not quite (like being an apprentice to my own research). What started out as a generous observation then became an induction. Since that’s what I do, I’m going to try to do it better. I tell myself that our inquiries should have the same effect. The same way of ‘making things matter’, including for those who are being questioned about what matters to them.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This publication is an outcome of the project ‘Establishing the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P)’, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101086898 / HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-TALENTS-01.
