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Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment

by María J. Prieto and Elise S. Youn

On a recent visit to Columbia University, Latour spoke to us about an exhibition he is curating at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany (Figure 1). Entitled “Making Things Public,” this project was inspired by Pragmatism, which stresses experimental testing and trusting in the world. As Latour puts it, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.”

Q: What is the goal of the “Making Things Public” exhibition? What are the intentions behind it?

BL: The aim of the “Making Things Public” exhibition is to try to assemble different ways of assembling. The show explores the idea of an “assembly of assemblies,” or more exactly, an “assemblage of assembling,” different ways of gathering things together.

There is no overarching party line in the show, even though what we are trying to do is very clear. The exhibition is more or less an opportunity to share my views about modernism. The different accumulations of things that are assembled are connected not by the top, as if they were all part of a huge, overall scheme, but by the bottom. They are connected by the fact that they are all techniques of representation. These techniques are necessary if you want to approach representation in the triple sense of science, politics and art. As techniques of representation, there is something that they all have in common. Indeed, we are just as interested in the structure of financial markets as we are in listening to religious sermons, creating “post-political” spaces in the classical sense of the word, or even learning how to build architectural models (we have a small part in the exhibition on this by OMA).

The aim of the show is to open up the repertoire of political attitudes and affairs. We are trying to steer the debate in a slightly different direction, one that is very inspired by the American tradition of Pragmatism. The main work of art – apart from the architectural installation done by the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia – is an invisible work of art called the phantom Body Politic. It is a sort of materialization of Walter Lippmann’s argument concerning the notion of the “phantom public.” It is actually a virtual work of art that will surround the whole exhibition, like political bodies surrounding us. We cannot see it, but we feel its effects. We want to try to do a visual, artistic re-presentation of what the body politic is in this Pragmatist tradition.

To answer the second part of your question, our intention is basically to regain confidence in mediation after the time of critique. My argument is that critique as a repertoire is over. It has run out of steam entirely, and now the whole question is, “how can we be critical not by distance but by proximity?”

The exhibition includes examples of many different techniques of representation – most of which seem to have very few connections to each other – in the 2500-meter-square space of the ZKM. It will push us to ask why all of these techniques of representation are connected to one another. The visitor is supposed to see the connections between these techniques.

When we usually think of politics, we think only of a very small series of attitudes that suppose a gathering of people around the question of the representation of people. These perspectives have little to do with things , nor are they related to other ways of gathering. The only thing we want from the visitors is for them to recognize that there are many other ways of assembling, and that most of this assembling – this politics – is about things. If you turn the things around, you get a different type of gathering and agreement, or dissent, which you don’t have in the classical definition of political philosophy.

Q: In your proposal for the “Making Things Public” exhibition, entitled, “’A Parliament of Parliaments,’ How to Overcome the Crisis of Representation,” you write, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.” How can individual architects and artists take part in the process of producing assemblies to “explore a new future,” while facing the modern duality that you describe in your book, We Have Never Been Modern? This duality is defined as the separation between nature and society.

BL: It is not a show about modernism per se. Although it is inspired by my argument that modernism is not the future of humanity, it is not specifically about that question. It is actually about a much simpler question: if we are dealing with matters of concern – and my argument tries to decode the shift between matters of fact and matters of concern – if we are moving in this direction, which seems to be obvious, although we don’t have to buy the whole argument from the anthropology of science about matters of fact and matters of concern – what are the aesthetics of this shift? What are the politics of it? In stylistic, artistic terms, these are the questions I want to raise in the show.

Now, why are architects involved? Architects have always been involved with these sorts of questions. We have a very nice sub-exhibit in the show that is a small reconstruction of Otto Neurath’s “Isotype” work in Vienna (1924-1934), from the time of the great modernist moment of logical positivism and the Bauhaus. I want to show the “Isotype” work as the perfect example of the link between the philosophy of science, logical positivism, architecture, the Bauhaus, aesthetics and social politics. I want to take the “Isotype” argument not to criticize it, but to say that it was an interesting event – a great, important moment for architecture and the philosophy of science, stylistically. However, it is not the moment in which we are right now. Now, we still see the connection between architecture, the philosophy of science, politics, statistics, social responsibility and so on, except there are no matters of fact as a bedrock on which to construct a perfectly pure style, a perfectly pure philosophy of science, a perfectly pure socialist politics, etc.

So I want this small exhibit on Neurath to ask everyone in the show, “can you do better than Neurath?” This is really a stylistic question: “can you do better than the Bauhaus, the logical positivists, the socialists, and those who were interested in the statistical-aesthetic connection?” Of course it’s a grand question, and it’s just an exhibition; it’s just 2500 meters square, and the budget is very small, but that is the question I’m interested in tackling.

Architects are also in the show in many other places. There is one exhibit on the architecture of parliaments themselves, as well as another on scale models. This exhibit on scale models is by OMA and tries to answer the question, “how do people utilize scale models to understand architecture?” So architecture is present in many areas. In terms of art history, the transformation of churches into temples is also featured in a sub-exhibit. However, architecture is significant because it is the constant metaphor about what it is to live in a common space. For instance, the dome is an architectural metaphor. This stylistic question can only be approached from a multidisciplinary point of view with philosophy, politics, sociology, design and of course architecture.

In the way it deploys these objects, the exhibition itself has to represent this multidisciplinary question. It won’t resolve it, but it will re-present the question. That is why it’s a very integrated exhibition. Everything that is in the show resonates with everything else. No one is allowed just to put something there and then isolate it from everything else. All of the projects are connected to each other, and because of this, they are also all in flux.

We are imagining a very fluid show because we are assembling things that have never been assembled together. These assemblies do not yet exist for the most part. It’s not like a normal show where you present things that already exist, and you bring them together for display in a museum. Here nothing exists yet. Apart from Cranach’s painting, which is already painted, everything else is being made expressly for the show on a shoestring budget, and mostly by people like me – complete amateurs – who have never done this sort of thing before.

Q: You write that one of your goals for the ZKM exhibition is to invent “new procedures, forms, shapes, and sites to dramatize the public space to literally, re-present them anew.” In what way can the architect create “new procedures” that encourage public interaction and criticism? How can the architect serve effectively as a mediator to engage the public in the creation process as co-designers?

BL: I cannot speak for the architect, but I can see why, metaphorically, architecture is important for building a common world. Practically speaking, I can also see that people should be enjoying the different parts of the show, no matter if they prefer the piece by OMA, the exhibit on the models of different parliaments, or the architectural intervention that the Columbia students are proposing (Figure 2). All of these projects are about the obvious interactions between space, things and common assemblies. Literally all architecture is about this question of the common world.

Then the question is, “which type, which style of architecture is adjusted to the task?” We have a whole style of architecture designed around the notion of matters of fact and the notion of objects: modernist architecture. What is the successor to this style of modernist architecture? I am interested in pushing the designer into asking, “if you have to imagine that the world does not consist of matters of fact, but instead of matters of concern, what happens with the concepts of function, sobriety, public space, etc.?” I am interested in trying to push the architect towards thinking about these issues.

Q: What is the responsibility of the architect in the process of “making things?” There seems to be a trend in architecture right now in which there is less interest in the architect engaging the public in a socio-political sense than relying on computer-generated systems and imagery. We see the emphasis you place on the thing, the end product (rather than on the individual and his choices) as a potential method of escape, as an excuse for the architect to avoid involving the public or dealing with socio-political considerations. Is there a way that you could clarify your concept of “making things” to ensure that the architect remains a critical agent?

BL: It is not just about making things; rather, it is about making things public. At the same time, if people want to escape their social responsibility, they are going to find a way. The question is not actually to insist on social responsibility at all – not because the exhibition is “apolitical,” but because the classical definition of “politics” is very narrow. The whole idea of the show is actually to say that there will be very little involved about politics in the sense of a conventional repertoire of demonstration, indignation, order and power.

Of course, all of these things are very important, but politics in the sense of assemblies of things and attachments to things is a much larger set. My understanding is that the crisis of representation is largely due to the fact that people define politics in too narrow of a sense; that is, it is always defined in terms of race, gender, power and class relations – a very limited repertoire. These relationships are important of course, but they are somewhat restrictive and carry too little of what the thing in its attachment really is. In fact, this position, which is the reiteration of political responsibility and social discourse, is actually apolitical. It is critical and can help someone feel good, but it does not necessarily propose an entry into the construction of the collective.

I have indeed done a lot of research in this area in the past, but I think the crisis of representation today occurs because it is very difficult to speak about the production of things with this limited repertoire. This repertoire blocks you at the entry of science and technology, and architecture is part of science and technology.

If I understand the question, you are worried that the interest in things will “demobilize the masses,” so to speak. Is that right?

Q: Well not the masses generally, but architects specifically, if they are so focused on producing things, which seems to be the case.

BL: Things are not objects. In fact, things are precisely the opposite of objects. When we are focused on things, we are actually also focused on ourselves. When I am focusing on the attachment of this coffee cup, I am actually getting back to myself quite fast, as well as to the entire history of Italian coffee-making, the people who are harvesting the coffee, etc. This cup of coffee is an assembly. In the exhibition, for example, we have shopping carts that are made from different products, so these shopping carts are in fact political assemblies as well.

If you are interested in things, you are precisely not being limited to objects – that is the difference. To arrive at the thing, you are proliferating in all sorts of places that do not of course look “political” in the traditional sense of the word, but they certainly do not look like objects either, in the same sort of isolated, bounded ways that have so often fascinated modernists. That is exactly the point of style. There is something in the object that is detached from the background and foreground and that has a much narrower definition of what it is to be connected to the world.

Q: There is another trend in architecture towards using the self-organizing system to generate a formal language. Software programs such as Maya allow the architect to plug in a set of coordinates in order to generate instantly a form that is then placed onto the site. What is your opinion of the use of artificial self-organizing systems both in architecture as well as in the social sciences?

BL: I don’t know enough about this software, although I am very interested in it. Actually, for the exhibition I am looking to understand what the visual display of things is, instead of what the visual display of objects is. First, all of these methods are very old from what I understand. The idea of self-organizing systems was invented in the 16th century. It is nothing new.

I am from Beaune in Burgundy, which is the birthplace of Gaspar Monge, the inventor of descriptive geometry. All of these computer-based visualizations are basically faster versions of descriptive geometry. The world in which the object is made to move is a modernist world from beginning to end.

So it is not as if you are talking about a new world with self-organizing systems, on the one hand, and CAD-based designs on the other. You are actually still in an old world – the very old world of modernity – where objects move without being transformed. They are instead geometrically manipulated or projected. With this kind of projection, you do not move an inch out of the modernism framework. You are still focused on the object rather than the thing.

A new beginning would be – in contrast to the world of objects we’re imagining now – about how the architect displays a thing, which in an architectural project would mean to draw connections between where you would simultaneously see the people of the neighborhood criticizing the project, where you would see the costs, the pollution, the asbestos removal in the building, etc. As an architect, using this kind of visualizing software, you would be able help people figure out this non-modern space on your computer.

Q: With Maya, there are many different approaches to design, many different factors you can input. For instance, you can design a weather system.

BL: Is this what you call “non-standard architectures?”

Q: Yes, it is related to that exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It has to do with artificially creating natural systems such as weather, and with expecting unexpected things to happen based on the self-generating systems created by the computer program. There is also an interest in trying to build formal chimeras using this kind of computer-generated design.

BL: What you are describing seems to be the same as 16th-century Baroque design. This kind of architecture is based on anamorphosis, on the whole imagination of the modernists. The “Non-Standard Architectures” exhibition that took place in Paris is completely modernist. It is about formalism, mastery, self-organization, and anamorphosis. In addition to that, I found the architecture exhibited in the show terribly ugly. Non-standard architecture represents a monstrous kind of formalism. It seems to me to be much more related to some sort of late Archimboldo anamorphosist invention than anything that is related to matters of concern.

However, I want to return to this issue of matters of concern. Why am I interested in the work you do at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture? Precisely because I am hoping that you can deliver to me at the ZKM in Karlsruhe a space that begins to resemble the spatial requirement of this new non-modernist language. That is really what I am interested in.

And since there has been this discussion about Manhattan post-September 11th, can you retranslate this discussion in a visual vocabulary and grammar that can then serve to teach us a lesson – independent from the final result – which will allow us to understand that we are really entering another world, not the Baroque world of anamorphosis, mastery, formalism, and matters of fact? The world is not made of these categories. Nevertheless, we still need the visual tools; we need CAD to design; we need these methods. But why should we limit ourselves by leaving modernism to amorphism? Amorphism is the post-modern version of a crisis. It tells us, “let’s have no shape.” No, the collective has to have a shape – a very strong one – but this shape has to be invented.

Q: Rem Koolhaas is considered one of the most “political” figures in architecture today. Yet, he seems to be a strategist who adapts himself and his work according to the global market, rather than acting as a critical mediator. What do you think of the way Koolhaas has defined the role of the contemporary architect, both as a master architect and as a role-model for the younger generation?

BL: I cannot answer that last part because I am not an architect. It so happens that I know Koolhaas fairly well because I have two students – one of whom has studied with him and the other who is working with him – and so I have met him several times. I think that one of his important aspects is that he is – like me – said to be cynical, because he is not politically correct, in the sense of simply articulating the critical idiom. So he is often accused of being complacent and conniving with market forces, as if he were sort of enjoying this kind of power in architecture.

I think this is a very silly critique of him because more importantly, Koolhaas is a perfect example of the difference between having a political stance and being interested politically. Of course he does not have a political stance in the sense that he does not say what he is supposed to say or what makes people feel good – which is that market forces are dominated by late capitalism. Compared to people who do say these things, he looks conniving and complacent.

However, his way of handling the question of “non-modernism,” “second modernism” or “hypermodernism,” as he may call it, is highly political because it produces architecture (such as the CCTV Headquarters Building in China) and books (such as Mutations, which I find very interesting as a sociologist, and The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping) that recognize the presence of politics. These works are ten times more interesting, for instance, than dozens of other works done by sociologists of the city and of markets.

Take The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping; there are hundreds of books (by Walter Benjamin, etc.) lamenting the consumption and the Americanization of the world. But what Koolhaas has produced is much more interesting, even in terms of science and data than all of these lamentations over the power of the market, because he is interested in attachment.

It is something like a “new realism” that is part of an engagement with the future. Of course it does not look “politically correct” because it does not pay respect to the very small number of categories you already have.

Now since I am not an architect, I cannot offer a critical opinion about his architecture. I find that Koolhaas’ buildings are often ugly, but I know he likes them to be like that. I am not an architect, but as a social scientist, I can tell you that the series of books he did are masterpieces.

Q: Like Koolhaas, you are said to be somewhat of a cynic. Yet there is also a tone of idealism in your work, in terms of how recognizing the politics in things can open up new ways of thinking and being critical. Also, your ideas are clearly related to Pragmatist theory and the interest in trusting in the world, in testing out your ideas through doing and making things. However, as you mentioned earlier, there is a difference between simply “making things” and “making things public,” or actually engaging people to create something public and constructive. How does your work try to negotiate this difference? What is the goal of your work?

BL: What is common between Koolhaas and me, if I dare say so, is experimentalism. The political sphere is not yet composed; it has to be composed. The common world is not made; it has to be made. There is no authority that has the definition of the common good; it has to be experimented upon. Where are the experimental tools? What is the public demonstration? How do we prove these positions?

I think that is where the Pragmatist outlook in politics is just starting. Intellectually, the current interest in Pragmatism raises an important point: why did Lippmann and Dewey create such an interesting definition of politics in 1930, and then we waited 70-80 years to recover it? What happened in between? What happened in between was the introduction of a completely authoritarian definition of politics from the right – with economic cybernetic systems theory – and also from the left – with the whole rise and demise of Marxism. Now back to Pragmatism, if you read Lippmann’s book, The Phantom Public (Library of Conservative Thought), it is as fresh as if it were just off the press. If you read Dewey, it is amazing how contemporary it seems.

I think we have become interested in Pragmatism again because “the public” continues to be a problem. “The public” is not what is meant simply by a certain definition of the common good. If you speak about it in terms of a common good, then you have to find the experiment that makes it work. Where is the experiment that proves that you are right? If you decide you can define what is good for Americans or good for architects, for instance, where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of the demonstration. Decode this protocol. Engage politics, not in the sense of feeling good and having the right set of political positions and so on, but around the protocol of debriefing the collective experiment.

In that sense, to come back to Koolhaas, I find a great resonance in what Koolhaas has done in his book on the development of China’s Pearl River Delta, Great Leap Forward. It is a monstrous experiment, but this experiment is decoded in a book that is much more interesting than all the whining and criticizing about the modernization of China. In that sense, Koolhaas is involved in debriefing the collective experiment. This is also precisely what I am trying to do in my own work and in the “Making Things Public” exhibition.

Bruno Latour is author of Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Paris: Invisible City (2004), and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). He has taught at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris since 1982. Together with Peter Weibel, he was the curator of “Iconoclash” (2002).

"Making Things Public" will open at the ZKM Karlsruhe in March 2005. For this event, Columbia University's Center on Organizational Innovation and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation have been working together with Latour to design an installation that deals with the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan.