The New York Times Magazine recently published a lengthy article on the influence of Bruno Latour's work on science. We got to thinking about Harvard University Press's long history publishing Latour's work. We're celebrating University Press Week with a speech given by Latour's long time editor Lindsay Waters when Latour won the Holberg Prize, which captures the early memories of Latour's influence on HUP. #ReadUp
This was delivered by Lindsay Waters at dinner in honor of the Holberg Prize Laureate Bruno Latour hosted by the Norwegian Government, 5 June 2013, Hakon’s Hall, Bergen
I come from Norwegian America, the Upper Midwest, happy now at last to be in the home of the culture of Ibsen and trolls, the culture we celebrated in Minnesota in the foods we ate, the holidays we enjoyed, and the books we read and (in my case) published.
If you are Norwegian, chances are you’ve been on the water. And if you’ve been sailing, no doubt you’ve had the experience as a member of the crew of watching the skipper on the bridge trying to match what the navigator sees on the charts. If you are not a member of the crew, but rather a passenger, you might be disturbed to hear the navigator exclaiming that he’s not lost. If you are reading a big, thick scholarly treatise by the winner of the Holberg Prize, you also might be more than a little surprised to read a passage in the book where the author exclaims, talking in the name of a character he’s commending to our attention, “I am not lost. I know where I am. I am not making a mistake.” As your prize-winner, Bruno Latour, writes, the comfort I gain hearing such news from an author, when I am already committed to a lengthy cruise with this author as skipper, is relative. As Tintin might say, “I’m scared, Captain Haddock!!”
A few years ago I was sailing out from Long Island Sound into the ocean. The Sound tapers off to the “Race,” which is fast because it’s such a narrow conduit for so much water to flow through. It was 3:00. in the morning. I was the navigator, and my job was trying to read the signals from lighthouses. The chart said the light on the port side should blink every 4 seconds, but was I looking at the correct lighthouse? And was that 3 seconds or 4 seconds? Could I know for sure? The skipper and every one asleep in the hold was depending on me to be right, and I was going to have to guess the best I could, really. I was thinking: I am not lost; or am I?
Just as the people asleep in the hold are counting on the navigator and the skipper to negotiate the passage from Long Island Sound out into Block Island Sound and the open ocean safely, so the world is counting on the Harvard Press and the trustees of the Holberg Prize to make sound decisions, but what if I told you that my decision to press for acceptance of the first Latour book we accepted, Science in Action, was really a typical publisher’s decision—a kind of wild guess based on several hunches? In proposing the book to my colleagues and the Board of Syndics of the Harvard University Press, I was committing the sort of sin publishers always do, working with much less information than you would want from an airline pilot landing through the fog and “de syv fjell,” the seven mountains that encircle Bergen and touch down at its airport. Moreover, as a publisher, my motives were not pure. I had heard about the book from one of the smartest deconstructionists I have ever known, a card-carrying deconstructionist and a most heterodox thinker. This guy picked up on trends before they’d poked up one leaf on the forest floor. But I recognized a pattern in my consideration of Latour. The pattern was part of a larger whole I could hardly perceive when I strenuously promoted the book with colleagues and the world. I came to understand his books deeply, but that was not essential for me to do my job well at the beginning of our course together.
For me one of Bruno’s many glorious—by which I mean smart and funny—pieces of writing is a review essay of a book by Edwin Hutchins called Cognition in the Wild. In that essay Bruno has some lines that describe nearly perfectly the sailing and publishing decision that led the Harvard Press to take on the first book of his we did. Bruno writes that “cognition has nothing to do with minds nor with individuals but with the propagation of representations through various media, which are coordinated by a very lightly equipped human subject working in a group, inside a culture, with many artifacts and who might have internalized some parts of the process.” “I am not lost,” the publisher exclaims. A lot of what happens in publishing is the telling of stories, some more convincing than others. Bruno’s work is primarily about empirical cases of how scientists employ rhetoric. One of the most famous cases he tells is about how scientists wrote their scholarly articles about microbes in a way that would convince people to mobilize forces, especially research money, in a fight against anthrax.
You can have the facts and a command of rhetoric, but you also need people willing to play ball, people with the kind of flexibility of mind that our Syndics had when I brought them Science in Action. Success might come if you can connect the dots, but you can only do that in groups, if people cooperate, that is, if the skipper and the navigator work together using the charts and the boat. When I presented Latour’s first book to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics, I took a risk and revealed to them how risky it would be to publish his work. I was aided by the masterful rhetoric of the historian Roy Porter who told the Syndics the truth as best he could see it and describe it, and did so in a way they found captivating. What I did that day with Roy’s help and the Syndics’ agreement was as tricky as sailing a boat through the Race. Listen to the report he gave me that I transmitted to them:
13 June 1986,
Dear Lindsay,
Imagine yourself as a publisher in 1759 confronted with the manuscript of one Monsieur Voltaire’s Candide. Do you take the risk, or risk missing out on something which will create a vast buzz of excitement? I fear that you are somewhat in this position, for Latour’s book has an exceedingly Voltairian stamp on it.
On the plus side, it is exceptionally stylish, vivid, beautifully composed, impish, etc. Latour is a master of the rhetorical manipulation of his readership. On the other hand, an approach like this carries cost as well. Latour works with broad brush strokes. Science in Action is an anthropologist’s view of science, science as seen by an outsider (say, proverbial Martian) who is neither its enemy or advocate.
The question is: who will be convinced? To sum up, this is a rather brilliant book. It is bound to achieve wide notice. It offers easily the most persuasive and comprehensive vision of science looked at from the anthropological point of view. I do have doubt about its precise readership. All of that said, would you have wanted to miss publishing Candide?
Good luck, best,
Roy
It makes a difference that HUP publishes Latour, and it makes a difference that you in Bergen are giving your Holberg Prize to him. This award is not the end of a process but an action that is part of a long train of actions. You are not giving him a prize to reward a career that is over, but one that is in mid stream, with much left to achieve. Science in action, as the saying goes!
Latour argues that Pasteur was not a solitary genius but a person capable of mobilizing many forces. The actor is part of a network. The unit of action is the whole network. Pasteur is not a French hero to be sculpted in stone and put on a pedestal; he is not Napoleon. He is Kutuzof—a favorite figure for Bruno—the Russian defeating Napoleon. In fact, as Hutchins and Latour contend, the actors in an event include not just people but people and things, working in unison. In the same way publishing houses and international prizes like the Holberg think, discover, and progress not as individuals but within networks of power. Labs think, not individual minds. Latour’s thinking agent (like Ed Hutchins’) “is more like the desk of a well-organized executive: empty, since every thing else has been delegated outside to something or to someone else.” This reminds me of the desk of the most brilliant French publisher in the post World War II era I ever knew, Jerome Lindon of Minuit. His desk looked the way you’d imagine John Wayne’s desk would look—empty. Every thing delegated.
The key thing is that you in Bergen could see the pattern the way the skipper and I could see the pattern in the lights in the lighthouses on the charts for Long Island Sound, just enough to know that we were not lost and we were going to be safe taking this course through the race with Bruno Latour.
