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The Public Proceduralization ofContingency: Bruno Latour and theFormation of Collective ExperimentsMatthias GrossPublished online: 24 Mar 2010.

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Social EpistemologyVol. 24, No. 1, January–March 2010, pp. 63–74

ISSN 0269–1728 (print)/ISSN 1464–5297 (online) © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/02691721003632826

The Public Proceduralization of Contingency: Bruno Latour and the Formation of Collective ExperimentsMatthias GrossTaylor and FrancisTSEP_A_463791.sgm10.1080/02691721003632826Social Epistemology0269-1728 (print)/1464-5297 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis2410000002010MatthiasGrossmatthias.gross@ufz.de

Social scientists have traditionally attempted to avoid extending strategies for acquiringexperimental knowledge to the sphere of the social. Bruno Latour, however, has introduceda notion of the collective experiment, an experiment conducted by and with us all. In thisshort paper I seek to explore, by way of elucidating the talk of collective experiments, thatLatour’s notion has long since existed in the theory and practice of ecological design andrestoration. Practitioners in ecological restoration projects find themselves in a situation ofdouble contingency, since neither do they know how nature will respond to their interven-tion nor is their interpretation of these responses already certain. Experimental practice insociety then becomes the proceduralization of this contingency.

Keywords: Public Experiments; Experiment and Society; Science and Democracy; Bruno Latour; Public Ecology

Introduction

Shortly before he died, Pierre Bourdieu boldly asserted that the sociology of sciencefulfilled no useful purpose and that, by playing its relativistic games it had merelysucceeded in relegating itself to the sidelines (Bourdieu 2004).1 But surely evenBourdieu would not be able to deny that the sociology of science—more so thanmost of the other sociological subdisciplines—has regularly gifted not only otheracademic disciplines but also the broader public a number of influential concepts andunusual specialist terms. We need only think of Robert K. Merton’s “role model,” his

Dr Matthias Gross is Research Scientist in the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and SeniorLecturer (Privatdozent) in sociology at the Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany. His research interests focuson environmental sociology, theories of the knowledge society, ecological restoration, and science and technologystudies. Correspondence to: Dr Matthias Gross, Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, HelmholtzCentre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany. Email: matthias.gross@ufz.de

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“unintended consequences,” or again his phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which haslong since seeped into everyday usage (cf. Merton 1976). Subsequent to this, scienceand technology studies (STS)—sometimes also known as the “new sociology ofscience”—caused little short of a furore in the 1990s, even beyond its own disciplin-ary confines, with the now infamous “science wars.” Some strands of the humanitiesand of science studies were targeted, especially by individual scientists, as an opportu-nity to declare war on the supposedly postmodern relativization of the scientific claimto truth.2

Not without reason, Bruno Latour is one of those STS authors who attracted a greatdeal of attention during the “science wars.” However, even back in the late 1970s and1980s, his inventive neologisms, formative concepts and general style of speaking—often bordering on the poetical—provided excellent entertainment for his willingaudiences and readers. In addition to his grand theories—such as that we have neverbeen modern, or that the entire world is made up of hybrids—a small sideline has alsoemerged since the 1990s that has counted among his more interesting (if notably lesscelebrated) concepts; namely, the notion of the collective experiment, an experimentconducted by and with us all. This concept deserves far greater attention, however, ifwe wish to take seriously Latour’s speculations about a non-modern constitution aswell as his experiments with deciding on the integration of external nature into aparticular collective as presented, for example, in his book The politics of nature (Latour2004). In the following, therefore, I seek to explore this sideline of Latour’s in some-what more detail and to show that his call for a parliament of things has long sinceexisted in the theory and practice of ecological design—without Latour’s poetic formu-lations, of course. Far from wishing to demonstrate that Latour has nothing new tooffer, my aim here is rather to show that the basic idea of his approach can be renderedspecific and thus be fruitful for empirical research in environmental sociology, culturalstudies, and science and technology studies.

First, then, I shall discuss Latour’s notion of collective experiments, which tends tooccupy the margins of his work, in order to then apply his ideas to adaptive manage-ment and ecological restoration, which see themselves as “experimental” practices, andto test them in terms of their usefulness.

Experiment and Society: Latour’s Collective Experiments

Sociologists have traditionally attempted to avoid extending strategies for acquiringexperimental knowledge to the sphere of the social. In his critical discussion of theideas of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, both of whom had addressed at lengththe possibility of experimentation in the social sciences, Emile Durkheim, for exam-ple, noted: “When the phenomena can be artificially produced at will by the observer,the method is that of experimentation proper” (Durkheim 1982, 147). For Durkheim,the key feature of sociological explanations must be that they demonstrate causal rela-tionships by linking a phenomenon with its cause or a cause with certain effects.Durkheim believed, however, that “social phenomena clearly rule out any control bythe experimenter”; it thus seemed to him that “the comparative method is the sole

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one suitable for sociology” (Durkheim 1982, 147). Shortly following this, however, heoffers a ray of hope for the sociological experiment. If chemistry and biology are soself-evidently experimental sciences, then why not sociology too, whose object ofstudy distinguishes itself “by virtue of their greater complexity” from those of thenatural sciences? While this point of view, according to Durkheim, entails certaindifficulties, “but one cannot see why it should be radically impossible” (1982, 148).Despite all this, he is ultimately forced to conclude that, using sociological experimen-tation, we “shall only be able to assign vaguely some ill-defined effect to a confusedand amorphous group of antecedents” (Durkheim 1982, 149–150). The complexity ofthe social is clearly not so easy to bring under control. At about the same time asDurkheim, his French colleague René Worms reaches the conclusion that analyzingcomparable cases is, in principle, the same method as analyzing experiments, forwhich reason Worms quite readily assumes the existence of “social experiments”—experiments that society itself has initiated—in order thus to discover the lawsgoverning the social (Worms 1991, 129–137).

Latour expresses a similar view, although he does not (yet) believe in laws thatgovern society. Latour introduced his theory of collective experimentation in today’ssociety to his benevolent public most prominently in an essay that was published inprint and online in many forms and was given as a speech at several major conferencesin the early 2000s.3 “That we are all engaged into a set of collective experiments thathave spilled over the strict confines of the laboratories does not need more proof thanthe reading of the newspapers or the watching of the night TV news,” Latour (2001,n.p.) writes casually, and continues:

At the time I am revising this paper, thousand of volunteers and specialists are trying tofight against yet another oil spill from the ‘Prestige’s sunken hull while, when I was draftingthis talk, a few years ago, thousand of officials, policemen, veterinarians, farmers, customofficers, firemen, were fighting all over Europe against the foot and mouth virus that wasdevastating so many countryside.4

So why does Latour not follow Durkheim, instead describing events around foot andmouth disease nonetheless as an experiment? Latour writes: “We find ourselves entan-gled in the unwanted—but wholly predictable—consequences of a decision to experi-ment, at the scale of Europe, on how long non-vaccinated livestock could survivewithout a new bout of this deadly disease” (Latour 2001, n.p.) In this sense, then, therest of society is burdened with a scientific experiment and is indeed involved in anexperiment, so that everyone becomes an active participant, whether they want to beor not. This insight is by no means new. In addition to René Worms, Robert E. Parkand his colleagues had previously sought as early as the 1920s to conceptualize modernsocial development in general as an experiment (Park 1929), and so had Jane Addams(all influenced by John Dewey; cf. Gross 2009). In the 1960s Donald Campbell (1969)developed a technocratic model of social experiments, and Wolfgang Krohn andJohannes Weyer, in the 1990s, told of implicit experiments going on since the 19thcentury that have—whether knowingly or unknowingly—involved society in researchactivities (Krohn and Weyer 1994).

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Bruno Latour’s colleague Ulrich Beck, however, comes to a strategically cleverconclusion based on the fact that society and science are inextricably interwoven: sincescience has allowed research to spread out from the laboratory and into the widerpublic, it has “thereby forfeited its exclusive right to judge what an experiment signi-fies” (Beck 1995, 125). In other words, it is now up to the human and social sciences aswell to define this new experiment and to frame it in a precise fashion in order to facil-itate a better understanding of contemporary society. Latour, along with Beck andothers, has made a considerable effort to popularize this way of framing the relation-ship between science, culture, and society. However, both Latour and Beck go one stepfurther. For Beck, with his talk of the “world as laboratory” (Beck 1995, 99), or even ofa “global experiment” (Beck 1995, 125); as also for Latour, “the laboratory hasextended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses, factories,hospitals have become so many subsidiaries of the labs” (Latour 2001, n.p.). Latoureven asserts that the whole world is caught up in an experiment, in which the ratio ofworld to experimental set-up is 1:1, with both running in real time. What might thismean? Even if science has forfeited its exclusive power to define the experiment,comments like those from Latour mean that the concept of experiment loses anyprecision it may have had and thus becomes less attractive to any scientific discipline:experiment comes to have the same meaning as development, complexity, intercon-nection, globalization, and so comes to mean the same as virtually anything that issubject to change. In other parts of his work, however, Latour displays some rathermore elaborate set pieces to describe collective experiments.

One of the key points of Latour’s writings is the theory that the strict divisionbetween nature and the social is one of modernity’s fictions. This means, says Latour,that humans are conceived solely as subjects and non-humans solely as objects. Latourcounters this view by setting it against his “amodern” version. In comparison with themodern constitution, where the chamber of facts may be entered only by scientists andthe chamber of values only by politicians and “moralists,” in Latour’s parliament ofthings—the non-modern constitution—both chambers require everybody’s coopera-tion. According to Latour, scientists should no longer speak only on behalf of naturaland technical objects—that is, for the facts in the sense of objectively existing circum-stances—and politicians should no longer speak only on behalf of subjects—in otherwords, for values in the sense of human value judgments. Instead, non-scientists,perhaps even the entire population, should also be involved, as part of a collective, indetermining how best to represent external nature. The characteristics and interests ofthe entities to be integrated into the collective are to be determined through a publiclegal process of deliberation.

Latour therefore proposes that we should no longer distinguish between scientistsand non-scientists, but between established and non-established facts and values.These should be allocated to two new chambers in such a way that each chambercombines a category of facts and a category of values. These two chambers no longerreflect the old separation of powers between facts and values but rather a new divisionbetween an inclusive/including power in the upper house and an ordering power in thelower house. Latour’s upper house concerns itself with non-established facts and

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values. Its task is to analyze human and non-human “candidates” outside the estab-lished collective and to hold a public consultation on the question of whether thesecandidates should be included in the collective; that is, whether they should stillcommand our attention.

Even for those scholars who have concerned themselves only marginally with partic-ipation processes in environmental politics,5 Latour’s comments may seem rather likean abstract version of various civil society attempts to democratize science and envi-ronmental planning through participation. However, Latour stresses that the questionas to which entities, and how many of them, have a place in such a new community canonly be explored through what he describes in overarching terms as a “collective exper-iment.” In the glossary at the end of The politics of nature, Latour defines collectiveexperimentation thus:

When it is no longer possible to define a single nature and multiple cultures, the collectivehas to explore the question of the number of entities to be taken into account and inte-grated, through a groping process whose protocol is defined by the power to follow up.From the word “experimentation” as it is used in the sciences, I borrow the following: it isinstrument-based, rare, difficult to reproduce, always contested; and it presents itself as acostly trial whose result has to be decoded. (Latour 2004, 238)

The latter part of Latour’s definition in particular, intended to give an indication of theareas of overlap that exist with the concept of experiment in the natural sciences, isactually more indicative of Latour’s interpretation of a scientific experiment from asociology of science perspective. The scientific experiment as it is represented in text-books, and indeed as Durkheim appears to have understood it as well, differs fromLatour’s version in this respect: for a hypothesis to be verified or falsified, a preciselydefined situation must be prepared in advance in order subsequently to enable thebehavior of the system thus prepared to be observed. An experiment is still quiteevidently not expected to be a rarity; rather, it should be capable of being repeated moreor less at will in order to count as an experiment, so that the same results emerge evenif the repetitions occur at different times and in different places.6

Latour sees the world of the experiment differently:

We are now all embarked in the same collective experiments mixing humans and non-humans together—and no one is in charge. Those experiments made on us, by us, for ushave no protocol. No one is explicitly given the responsibility of monitoring them. (Latour2001, n.p.)

Yet Latour does mention one precondition for the potential reproducibility of experi-ments: the laboratory protocol. Who exactly should write the protocol and the reportin future, and how should it be done? Despite posing this very question prominently inthe subtitle of his essay (“Which protocol for the new collective experiments?”), uponcloser inspection Latour’s answer turns out to be fairly outmoded. In his parliament ofthings, it is the scientists, politicians, economists and what he calls moralists whoshould jointly decide on the definition and creation of facts and values to be used inrepresenting nature. Nowadays Latour no longer speaks at all of the hybridization ofhumans and non-humans, or even of an a priori symmetry between nature and culture

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generated by the term actant, as propagated in Latour’s (1993) classic book We havenever been modern. He now even describes his one-time attempt to establish a symme-try between nature and culture as an “naïve, since no matter how hard we may try makeartifacts symmetrical, they remain artifacts” (Latour 2004, 283), and he stresses that hisapproach is not about “the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humanand non-human’” (Latour 2005, 76). Latour also speaks of an “error I committed, inthe book on the moderns, by trying to establish symmetry between the artifact ofScience and that of Politics” (Latour 2004, 285). In his book Reassembling the social,however, he suddenly attributes at least partial blame to the reader for this way of read-ing his comments on symmetry. Latour writes that he stopped talking about symmetry“when I realized that readers concluded from it that nature and society had to be ‘main-tained together’ so as to study ‘symmetrically’ ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’, ‘non-humans’and humans’” (2005, 76, note 89).

Since the publication of The politics of nature (if not prior to this), his main concernhas been with processes of cooperative decision-making, in which nature should gainthe right to speak on its own behalf by means of a particular form of representation.Unlike the earlier “sociology of the social,” says Latour, the sociology of the 21stcentury is best served when it sees itself as a discipline in which participants—humanand non-human—“explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective” (Latour2005, 247). For Latour, the word “social”—the notion of the social world or of whatsociologists of the social had termed society—stands for a hopeless attempt to compre-hend reality. In Latour’s re-ordering of the social, he is seeking—in particular with thehelp of classical sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904)—to return to the originalmeaning of the social, in order to show that the social is not a part of reality that can beseparated off in any meaningful way; instead, it is a principle of connection, associationand relationship. According to Latour, this contrasts with another sociological tradi-tion that attempted to divide the social from biological organisms and from externalnature. The social in Latour’s re-ordering becomes visible only when new collectivesconsisting of various human and non-human participants are formed, triggered bysurprising deviations from accepted facts and values, which are then able to becomestabilized as associations through accepted facts and values.

This all sounds very promising at first sight, since—whether consciously or uncon-sciously—Latour uses classical sociological terminology from the late 19th century andearly 20th century in coining his two core terms “collective” and “association”—thelatter containing the implicit reference to Ferdinand Tönnies’ concept of society as asso-ciation and Simmel’s concept of “societalization.”7 One might paraphrase this in termsof the re-ordering of the social as a return to the origins of sociology. However, Latour’scollective experiments, with their linking of social and natural elements towards achiev-ing association, can usefully be rendered operational and fruitful for empirical socialsciences only once they have been freed from their abstract platitudes and flowery meta-phors. Otherwise, talk of collective experiments becomes an empty formula and is atbest a synonym for difficult and unusual processes of participation. With a little imag-ination, however, many of the elements involved in including non-human actors insociological analysis that Latour calls for and are crucial to environmental sociology can

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be brought into sociological analysis. In the following I shall show, by way of elucidatingLatour’s metaphors, that a collective experiment—even in the absence of his loadedmetaphorical usage—certainly can develop and thrive in the real world of ecologicalpractice.

Collective Experiments in a Public Laboratory?

How might collectives consisting of humans and non-humans be formed so that theirinteraction can be understood as experimental? This is exactly what has been attemptedin the practice of ecological restoration, adaptive management and neighboring fieldsfor at least the last 30 years: incorporating the “responses” from natural entities intosocial decision-making processes by adopting a position that shifts the interactionsbetween nature and humans to center-stage (cf. Jordan 2003; Lee 1993; Martin 2005).The endeavor to take seriously the unexpected suggestions of nature is manifested, forexample, in what restoration ecologist Bill Jordan calls “the deliberate inclusion ofunwanted, ‘negative’ elements, such as dangerous species, or elements such as fire”(Jordan 2006, 26). Integrating these natural elements requires no high-flyingmetaphorical talk of a parliament of things. What it does require, however, is a well-thought-through experimental design for the real world. Such a design includes: thecontinual renegotiation of the course of the experiment among heterogeneous actors,including nature as an actor; the inclusion of—potentially all—citizens as active co-designers and co-researchers; and, finally, a process in which surprising events(whether perceived as natural or as “social”) are processed in such a way that they leadto new knowledge about natural or “social” phenomena that will be useful in thefuture.

One model that is particularly suited to illustrating such an experiment can alreadybe found in one form or another elsewhere: for example, in adaptive management(Elzinga et al. 2001), in the concept of public ecology (Robertson and Hull 2003) andin real-world experiments in science studies (Gross and Hoffmann-Riem 2005), andeven, in its basic features, in John Dewey and the theory of “experiential learning”(Dewey 1975; Kolb 1984). Its many and varied components are characterized by thelinking of experience and action, knowledge application and knowledge generation,and thus also of facts and values.

Consider an example: any real-world experimental ecological intervention, theframing of which I wish to introduce here by way of expanding on Latour’s collectiveexperimental approach, is of course nearly always subject to complex processes ofnegotiation that can only partially be controlled or directed by scientists or some otherspecific social group. A targeted ecological intervention and a “design,” no matter howvaried the situations may be where it occurs—management of a contaminated region,design of a new landscape in a former open cast mining area, or the restoration of aeutrophic water course in the Alps—usually begins with an observation. The observeror observers do not necessarily have to be scientists; they may just as well be walkers,joggers or people without a PhD in soil physics who just happen to be driving past. Theobject of observation may be anything from a lake to a fallow area of agricultural land,

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a backyard or a river. Should the observations made run counter to expectations—thefish in the lake are swimming on their backs, the landscape is ablaze, a polar bear isromping around an urban backyard, or the color of the water in a river is red—then itis highly likely that subsequent communication about dealing with the impacts of thisdeviation or contradiction, which can be described as a surprise, will lead to renegoti-ation of the stocks of knowledge about the segment of reality that has been observed.In the everyday world, experiential habits can assume the role of expectations. In scien-tific environments this is usually done by suppositions formulated as hypotheses.However, a surprise cannot be registered in any meaningful way without an explicitrange of expectations (or ones reconstructed in retrospect) that might be attributed toa particular actor group. Instead, it presupposes the existence of an observer who canestablish a deviation from expectations.

The perception of these observation are Latour’s “new facts,” which surprise themembers of the collective and whose causes, effects and meanings are still subject tocontestation qua surprise at the moment of communication. In the interaction betweenhumans and the material environment, newly initiated processes of design can developtheir own dynamic, which may in turn be felt to be natural since it resists any method-ical control. These new sources of resistance have to be dealt with as “new facts.” Latourseeks to separate such new facts in his parliament from the established facts (e.g. the lawof gravity), which have a firm place in the shared world. Latour maintains that the usualunderstanding of facts relates only to the latter group, which, however, merely repre-sents the end point of a long work process (cf. Latour 2005, 87–120).

Apart from the fact that this seems to be a rhetorical move on Latour’s part thatenables him to fill his four requirements that, in his view, “must allow the collective toproceed according to due process to the exploration of the common world” (Latour2004, 109), this distinction is not needed in a real-world experimental design in anycase, because it is recorded as a surprise as soon as a deviation from an expectation isregistered. What seems more important to hold onto here, however, is the fact that asurprise (a new fact) is always an attribution that depends on an observer (judgment/evaluation). In Latour’s scheme, a surprise and an accepted law of nature would belocked away in his upper and lower house in order to link them up with two otherchambers containing personal (uncertain) as well as accepted (certain) values; ratherthan taking this approach, in the real world surprising facts and communication aboutthe values involved in whether it is responsible to continue the experiment despite thenon-knowledge arising from nature’s “response” should be negotiated together.

After a surprising observation has been made, uncertainty is often communicatedabout the newly recognized ignorance or non-knowledge (new facts). Latour’s non-established and therefore uncertain facts can be captured much more accurately usingvarious gradations of knowledge and non-knowledge than in his four-requirementsscheme.8 Two paths are then open to the participating actors in an ecological projectin terms of how to go about continuing the real-world experiment—in an ideal-typicalsense, both should be taken: a reassessment and renegotiation of knowledge that has sofar been accepted (Latour’s established facts); and, frequently associated with this, ashift in the interests of the actor constellation along with negotiation over any new

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values and objectives that may have emerged. Before any intervention is undertaken ina landscape, any new knowledge acquired needs to be adjusted to; that is, coordinatedwith the relevant constellation of interests. This is neither about passive adaptation norabout change that can be carried out at will; instead, it is about the “collective” engagingin a process of adjustment or careful probing, as is practiced with the help of mediationand participatory processes, for example. Only after that should a decision be madeabout possible intervention in the lake, in the post-agrarian landscape, in the greenedbackyard or in the river. The consequences of this intervention and, in this sense, afurther response on the part of nature, may then be observed once again (purposefullyor by chance). This gives rise to a closed loop, in which the intervention influences whathas been observed, and in which the outcome of observation in turn influences thedesign of the intervention in a possible further run-through of the cycle. In a furtherrun-through of this cycle, newly acquired stocks of knowledge—including facts deemedto be established—can, of course, also be called into question. At the same time, acertain robustness may emerge from these experimental cycles, arising from the exper-imental and learning-oriented design. Robustness thus describes the stability of theexperimental dynamic, even if unforeseen events generate surprise. Latour would prob-ably call this an emerging association—due to its self-stabilizing nature—consisting ofhumans and non-humans.

Outlook: Experimental Practice as a Proceduralization of Contingency

The practice of a cyclical, experimental or adaptive procedure in the interactionbetween humans and non-humans, as outlined above, is nothing unusual in appliedecology, landscape architecture or ecological restoration. The crucial point is that allthe essential ingredients of Latour’s parliament of things and his integration of the non-human environment are contained in these strategies. Moreover, the language of“nature as actor” is found as a matter of course in the self-descriptions of ecologicalpractitioners and landscape designers. Of course, it is one thing to register this way ofspeaking and another to integrate it into a social theory of interaction and communi-cation. To the extent that sociology is society’s description of itself—and who woulddeny it?—it is part of society’s language games. For this reason, the language and theoryof the social sciences cannot be made immune to the language and the observed activ-ities that it seeks to comprehend. If we take seriously the self-description of ecologicalpractitioners in social theory terms, non-human nature must somehow gain its “own”voice here. This is also one of Latour’s concerns in his explanation about what actornetwork theory, which he advocates, actually is: an approach that makes it permissiblefor observing actors to write their own theory (Latour 2005, 151–156). Formulated inthis way, however, this sounds very much like a version of the old ethnographic rule ofthumb; namely that culture is an agglomeration of various tangible, visible and verbalproofs, with the ethnologist trying hard “to read over the shoulders of those to whomthey properly belong” (Geertz 1975, 452). Put succinctly, even for Latour the phenom-ena to be observed should write their sociology for us, because, as John O’Neill put itwhen summing up his research strategy—taking Georg Simmel’s question further as to

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the possibility of society—“[t]he real nature of the question is to take members’ ownpractices as the rule” (O’Neill 1972, 167).

Practical action in ecological fields, as outlined above, can be interpreted to mean thatboth causal and communicative attributions can alternate within it. The designation“communicative” can be applied to the attitude adopted by the practitioners, ecologistsor other participants being observed when they have to wait and see what influence theyhave on nature or how nature responds. They find themselves in a situation of doublecontingency, since neither do they know how nature will respond to their interventionnor is their interpretation of these responses already certain. Experimental practice thenbecomes the proceduralization of this contingency. To start from this point and to drawon Latour’s metaphorical approach to analyzing this proceduralization appears to beone of the most exciting tasks facing many fields in social theory building on human-nature interactions.

Notes1[1] For a summary on the debate Bourdieu has triggered with this book, see Kim (2009).2[2] On the historical embeddedness of the “Science Wars” in controversies over contemporary

shifts in the status of science, see Bammé (2004), Callon (1999), and Parsons (2003).3[3] This essay first appeared in print in German in 2001 in the quality weekly newspaper Die

Zeit entitled “Ein Experiment von und mit uns allen” (“An experiment conducted by andwith us all”), and has since been reprinted and revised several times. The most accessibleEnglish version can be found on Bruno Latour’s own website. Available from http://www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-95%20MAX%20PLANCK.html; INTERNET.

1[4] Please note that small grammatical errors have been left in from the English version availableon Latour’s website.

4[5] For some examples of this from a variety of disciplinary and geographical perspectives, seeBrown (2006), Mahon et al. (2009), Newig, Voß, and Monstadt (2008), Renn, Webler, andWiedemann (1995), or Rogers (2008).

5[6] There are two more central aspects of a textbook definition of experiment that are bracketedout by Latour, so I will not consider them any further. They should, nevertheless, be noted.They are the controls of boundary conditions and the importance of independent and depen-dent variables.

6[7] Simmel’s concept of “societalization” has often been noted as being a processual concept andtherefore as an alternative to Gesellschaft—although there is seldom any proximity toLatour’s ideas. However, see on this point Gross (2003) and Pyyhtinen (2007). GeorgeHerbert Mead’s quasi-actor network theory-based ideas are also relevant here (cf. Puddephatt2005).

7[8] On the conceptual relation between non-knowledge, ignorance, and nescience as well asseveral types of surprises in the context of debates about a shift toward more post-normal,mode 2, or transdisciplinary science, see Gross (2010).

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