Bruno Latour_Michel Serres_and Fictions of the Enlightenment

Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Fictions of the Enlightenment
Author(s): Jonathan Lamb

Source: The Eighteenth Century , Vol. 57, No. 2, Special Issue: Bruno Latour and
Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies (Summer 2016), pp. 181-195
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/eighcent.57.2.181
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Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and
Fictions of the Enlightenment
Jonathan Lamb
Vanderbilt University
We do not yet control the unexpected road that leads from the local pavement,
from good intentions, towards a possible global hell.
—Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time1
In a review of T. J. Clark’s book on Pablo Picasso, Malcolm Bull quotes from

Bruno Latour’s extended discussion with Michel Serres, catching very nicely
the shock reverberating throughout the dialogue as the pupil absorbs the im-
plications of what the master is saying. Serres is recalling the savagery of the
bull-cults being recovered in France during the 1930s and the frequent images
of the Minotaur and the Jovan bull in the work of Max Ernst and Picasso: “atro-
cious forces unleashed on society,” to which Latour replies, “You’re saying that
these works are symptoms of the evil and not an analysis of those symptoms?”
And Serres rejoins, “Yes, symptoms.”2 Although it was during the course of this
conversation that Latour framed the attitudes to history, modernity, and sci-
ence that dominate his subsequent work, and in which the germ of the project
of his latest synthesis, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), is to be found,
the chaotic and violent implications of Serres’s applications of Lucretius to his
critique of modernity are evidently troubling to his epigone. Time and again
Latour will try to stabilize, or more properly spatialize, Serres’s evocations
of the non-metrical diversities—“the ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thun-
derous acceleration, rendings, gaps”—navigated by Hermes, the fleet-footed
messenger-god who travels through crumpled time to bring notices of foreign-
ness to all he meets.3 As Serres warms to this theme, his imagination fired by
the sixth book of De rerum natura, he compares Hermes with the ball in a game,
“a tracker of the relations in the fluctuating collectivity around it,” and then to
a flame, “fluctuating and dancing.” Latour asks if a synthesis can be made of
these fluctuations and Serres tells him to beware of the spatial image, for “net-
works . . . leave an image that is almost too stable. But, if you immerse it in time,
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 57, no. 2 Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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182 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
this network itself is going to fluctuate, become very unstable, and bifurcate
endlessly.” However Latour is fearful this may result in arbitrary rapproche-
ments: “What counts,” he says, “is precisely the system of mediate inferences,
a rootedness, a localisation, the slow work of intermediaries,” to which Serres
responds, “You have to take shortcuts.”4
Although the conversation with Serres covers the themes, ideas, and tech-
niques of Latour’s later work—that we have never been modern, that the
network is the zone of the quasi-object, that science is responsible for a gulf
opening up between the world and the mind cognizing it, that things are
somehow an index of that gulf, and that technology and physics form an im-
portant part of an anthropology of nonmodernity—it is nevertheless clear
that Latour is much more prudent than Serres in arranging his ideas of the
network, and averse to the risks of turbulence and fluctuation which afford
the latter his most electrifying and bizarre intuitions. Latour’s attachment to
localities (e.g. Mont Aiguille in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence) and to the
slow work of mediation require that Hermes’s wings be clipped, and that the
embodied suddenness in the motion of balls and flames (what Serres calls
their “pre-positions”) be replaced with reliable maps of relations: “a position
that will allow us to celebrate Mont Aiguille and map Mont Aiguille simul-
taneously.”5 In order to establish this kind of spatio-temporal coordinate he
ventures his own definition of what we have never, any of us, been when he
tells Serres:
For me “modern” does not mean new, modernist, modernizing. I understand it in

its more philosophical sense. To be modern is to make . . . the division of the past
from the present and [to make] the absolute division between the known world
and the mind that knows it; this is the meaning that Kant gives to modernity . . . it
means an absolute division between collective society and the real world.6
That Latour takes these ruptures more seriously than Serres (for whom they
are merely examples of the willful blindness of the moderns to the wisdom
of the ancients) is evident from the emphasis he lays on representation. In An
Inquiry into Modes of Existence he introduces the work as an exercise in “diplo-
matic representation” between competing forms of knowledge (scientific, an-
thropological, technological, imaginative, political) intended to highlight the
permutations of their possible relations by means of network signals ([SCI],
[POL], [TEC], [FIC], etc.). While alive to the danger of reinforcing the divisions
he means to bridge (“the idea that there is, on one side, that which exists, and,
on the other ‘representations’ of that which exists”7) he is equally alert to risks
taken by those who rely too much on the literal and end up like the dog in La
Fontaine’s fable, ignorant of the liberty they have lost.8 Although he doffs his
hat to the rare possibility of facts speaking for themselves,9 he stands at a good
distance from Serres’s enterprise of not reading signs (“My book Les Cinqs sens

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LAMB—LATOUR, SERRES, AND FICTIONS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 183
cries out at the empire of signs”10) and attending instead to “the discourse of
things . . . the formation of the existent in its matter . . . we had forgotten things
and what they said.”11
Positioning himself between “collective society and the real world” by
means of representation, Latour occupies the same ground taken by many
political philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth century. With such in-
convenient allies, especially Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, he needs to
distinguish between representation as a method used by the modern elite to si-
lence the noise of surplus human beings and that sort which assembles hybrids
in a constitution whose dispensations provide the only remaining chance for
community on the planet. So he argues that historically representation has been
corrupted, whether as a political structure or a scientific process, by its repre-
sentatives, who have dissembled their own interests at the expense of their con-
stituents, using justifications that can be found in Plato’s Gorgias or Niccoló
Machiavelli’s The Prince (1516). So modernity is founded on a lie that makes
people and things mute:
Hobbes’s descendants had defined the Republic in which naked citizens, unable to
speak all at once, arranged to have themselves represented by one of their number,
the Sovereign, a simple intermediary and spokesperson. What did this representa-
tive say? Nothing but what the citizens would have said had they all been able to
speak at the same time.12
Politics kidnapped science when the same trick began to be practiced by the
disinterested observers charged with giving a lucid and convincing account of
their experiments:
Boyle’s descendants had defined a parliament of mutes, the laboratory, where sci-
entists, mere intermediaries, spoke all by themselves in the name of things. What
did these representatives say? Nothing but what the things would have said on
their own, had they only been able to speak.13
Representation was managed better, Latour supposes, by the ancient Scandi-

navians with their institution of the Thing, specifically the Icelandic Althing
celebrated by Martin Heidegger, where a divided community came together to
settle their disagreements, congregating on a strip of coast itself formed out of
a geological argument between two colliding tectonic plates: a happy junction
then of human and thingly gathering. Like the scissors in Alexander Pope’s
The Rape of the Lock (1712), which divide in order to enclose, and then join in
order to divide, the Thing in its ancient constitution manifests a paradox rich
in synthetic possibilities of division and coalition. This is Latour’s modification
of Serres’s prepositions and their flame-like indeterminacy.14 This is what he
means to exploit in order to make parliaments properly vocal. Things are to

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be restored by the Thing, not to self-evidence, that is to say, but to the rights of
real and effective representation. “The res need to be represented, authored,” as
Latour points out in the opening essay of Making Things Public (2005).15 How
this collective, or All-Thing, would work dominates the subject as well as the
organization of Latour’s oeuvre. Modes of Existence is his most comprehensive
enquiry into the principles of such a community; Iconoclash (2002) and Mak-
ing Things Public are demonstrations, or shows, of how it might work. It will
involve representation of a new kind, for he declares, “we have committed
ourselves to providing representation for quasi-objects,” and while “we never
know whether we betray or translate,” he promises to patch nature back into
society so that the political task can begin again.16 His slogan: “We are aiming
at a politics of things.”17
By introducing the Althing effectually as a dual structure representing
human beings who desire to be vocal and matter, formerly mute but now am-
bitious to be heard, Latour amalgamates two distinct forms of representation
into a single scene of democracy: civil society that emerges along with mo-
dernity and the natural world from which the modern mind had unhappily
divorced itself. And this he accomplishes by means of an artful adaptation of
Serres’s metaphor for the complexities of history, namely the tectonic plate
moving vastly and infinitely slowly in a densely viscous medium while vari-
ous dramas—meteorological, geological, and human—are played out on its
surface. This tectonic plate also happens to be Serres’s most powerful figure for
the self-speaking thing, its message visible in its glacial flow. “The best model
is the thing itself,” he says, which suggests but does not actually affirm that no
analogies, mediations, or representations are needed to make its meaning—its
drift—evident.18
The instauration of Latour’s Thing is managed imperturbably, without any
inordinate degree of passion or disorder marring the events taking place on the
surface of the tectonic plate. Yet it is introduced as a model of representation
radically different from the mute parliaments that sit in silence inside Levia-
than and the laboratories of the Royal Society. So it might be best to look more
closely at them and their alleged failures in representation with four braided
ideas in mind: first, the ideas of civil society animating Hobbes’s idea of com-
monwealth compared with those which are outlined in Latour’s conversation
with Serres; second, the protocols of scientific experiment; third, Lucretius’s
atomic philosophy which provides the material basis for the investigations of
Hobbes and Boyle as well as Serres; and fourth, the attitudes to various kinds of
fiction explored by Hobbes and Latour and how far they contribute to the voice
and autonomy of the thing.
Serres gives a summary of the conjectural history of the original contract:
Probably the very first contract was empty and, being institutional, concerned
only us. We were still animals, and we remain so still when, as political creatures,

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we remain caught in the dizziness of pure and simple relations. . . . Then, along
comes the first referent of the contract. For example, an apple . . . the first object.19
Pithy though it is, this outline recruits three insights important to Hobbes: that
a contract drawn up by a multitude of individuals is empty unless authority
is transferred by a power separate from the contracting parties; that an autho-
rized contract secures a person’s (as opposed to an animal’s) right to the things
that may now be known as property (“humanity begins with things, animals
don’t have things”20); that the narrative of such a contract is only probable at
best, for most likely it never happened like this, and is nothing but a fiction.
Unlike Hobbes, Serres does not include the abridgement of suffering and death
as a motive for the contract, but he certainly believes that the fear of death is
strong in the human animal and was never entirely dissipated by community.
Technology and physics are “situated in the anthropology of death.”21 Knowl-
edge is accrued to the accompaniment of the clamor of human suffering and
never transcends “the intuition of our untimely death.”22 As opposed to Fran-
cis Bacon, who thought knowledge was in perfect service to “that whereunto
men’s nature doth most aspire, which is, immortality and continuance,” Serres
and Hobbes are bound by a much more modest estimate of the advantages of
knowledge to humanity, derived by both from Lucretius’s De rerum natura.23
In Lucretius’s view the force that impels human atoms through the void,
causing their swerve into communities, can never fully be explained or tran-
scended, and certainly never represented or be thought owing to representa-
tion. The scenes of suffering, failed sacrifice, aimless struggle, and agonizing
death that close his poem are unframed, soothed neither by symbolic or even
diagnostic explanations nor by a report of the end of the plague that caused
them. “You will recollect,” he instructs his reader, “what a poor Pittance of the
whole Earth is one Man.”24 The only consolation afforded to such a fragment
is closely to scrutinize its ruin as part of the general tumult. As for real atoms,
although driven by the same force as human ones, they will never die: their
immortality is a gift they share with the gods, vindicated every time a thing
breaks apart or a body decays into its constituent particles. That is why, when
Hobbes considered the nature of a political union authorized by humans alone,
with no divine power originating or directing it, he knew the result could not
be a deathless commonwealth, so he called Leviathan first an artificial man, and
then distinguished it with an oxymoron: a mortal god.
Hobbes knew, that is to say, how limited was the insurance that a common-
wealth offered refugees from a state of nature. The problem of mortality was
eased but not overcome, and the individual’s relation to things was at best stabi-
lized in a circuit of representations never as immutable as people desired. These
limited advantages of representation were based on a series of fictions, starting
with the fiction of the original contract, whose historical improbability Hobbes
was never at pains to justify, although he was ardent in arguing for the future

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benefits of believing in it—its prepositional virtue, as it were, outweighed the

lack of historical evidence. In his anti-materialist satire of Hobbes’s Lucretian
politics, A Tale of a Tub (1704), Jonathan Swift impersonated a human atom loose
in the print culture of the late seventeenth century who incessantly claims to be
a diplomatic representative of various collectives—the corporation of poets, the
company of modern writers, even of the universe itself, until finally he offers as
the ne plus ultra of his diplomatic credentials his mediation between the nation-
state and Bedlam, the hospital for the insane in London. Representation offers
no insurance at all, Swift is arguing: any mortal commonwealth is in all respects
conformable not with Hobbes’s system of personate delegation but to the chaos
and tumult of disturbed imaginations, a position much more consistent with
Lucretius’s and Serres’s. The mortal god is really an ungovernable crowd, liable
to riot at any moment unless menaced by the sovereign’s sword or restrained
by the whips and chains of the madhouse.
Despite Latour’s representation of Hobbes’s system of representation as the
silencing of things, his desire to tame the violence of the collective by means
of an adjustment between its competing interests is similar, and not at all like
Serres’s. The crumpled surface of the tectonic plate stands as Serres’s image of
a history that is nothing but violence and a physics of flux and disturbance.25
The surface of the plate records nothing but itself, the discourse of things and
their non-metrical diversities, and the pattern of that discourse is not a trace-
able line of developments and evolutions but the endless return of what he
calls “invariants.” “History,” he says, “still fades before the iteration of the
invariances,” among which he lists not only the wells, chimneys, gaps, and
rendings of the exuberant cloud formations of Lucretius’s sixth book but also
human misery, like the plague at Athens.26 Knowledge was sought not out of
an empirical confidence in our mastery of nature, but because “we suffered
from our misery or our crimes, and because we were moved by the intuition
of our untimely death.”27 Knowledge, he concludes, is not representation but
mourning. Invariants are the strains and fissures marked on the surface of the
tectonic plate by its ineluctable motion, advertising the incommensurability of
that viscous flow with any human intention. Mastery of nature, whether lo-
cated in the great calendars of learning assembled by Bacon or in the standing
reserve of Heidegger’s technology, always escapes from itself back into that
disorder: “Everything happens as though our powers escaped our powers—
whose partial projects, sometimes good and often intentional, can backfire or
unwittingly cause evil.”28
The history of empiricism therefore does not cut much ice with Serres: “No,
we did not set out long ago to understand things and act upon their future
because we felt and observed through the five senses, the way philosophy once
amused itself by saying we did.”29 We were much needier than that. Never-
theless the relation between the five senses and the mind is of central impor-
tance to Lucretius, and to Latour and the history of science he has written. “The

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senses cannot be refuted,” declared Lucretius before producing two rhetorical

questions that sound like a mixture of Saint Paul and Shakespeare’s Bottom:
“Will the ear be able to convict the eye, or the touch the ear? Will the taste of
the mouth again refute the touch, will nose confound it, or eye disprove it?”30
When Latour laments the modern separation between the human collectiv-
ity and the parliament of things, he regrets an ancient sympathy between the
mind and the world that needed no mediation or representation: “The Greeks
couldn’t distinguish between the world and representations of it.”31 Presum-
ably they made no distinction between the impression of a thing and the idea
of it, relying entirely for any knowledge of the world on the immediate infor-
mation of the senses.
This was an issue that exercised philosophers and scientists throughout
the Enlightenment and one that bore directly on experimental science. What
if, for example, one used a machine like a vacuum pump or a microscope to
supplement the sight of the scientist, which is not capable of telling when air is
evacuated from glass jar, nor of spotting the details on the armature of a small
insect? Does the device now own the experience, or has it merely extended
the dominion of the human eye that may now mediately seize on a fact that
before had been invisible? Opinions were divided, largely between those who
believed that an idea was a sign, not a copy, of a sensation that was in any case
internal to the subject (the smell is not in the rose but the nose) and those who
argued that the reception of the sensation was continuous with what caused it
and congruent with its image or vibration in the brain. Hobbes and Locke were
of the former school, David Hume and most of the associationists of the latter.
John Locke, for example, warned against believing that an idea had any direct
relation to a sense-impression. “There is nothing like our Ideas in the Bodies
themselves,” he said.32 On the other hand Hume begins his Treatise of Human
Nature (1738) by laying down the self-evidence of sensation as a fundamental
principle of empiricism: “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and
violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all
our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in
the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning.”33
Generally those who favored prosthesis as a means of advancing knowledge
were not of Locke’s opinion because the machine intervened only to maximize
the blow of the thing upon the nerve, the primordial moment of knowledge ac-
cording to Lucretius. Consensual theories of truth and taste, on the other hand,
required the grossly normative operation of the senses—individually imperfect
but agreeable to a general standard of truth.
No one was more attentive to the practical implications of the impact-theory
of knowledge than Boyle and his associates, particularly Robert Hooke. Con-
ceiving the human organism as a “hydraulo-pneumatical engine,” Boyle was
fully of Lucretius’s opinion that life is a constant circulation of corpuscles enter-
ing and leaving the body, involving not just mutual contact between the senses

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and their objects, but an actual and determinate exchange of inward and out-
ward substances.34 In Of the Great Efficacy of Effluviums (1673), he explores the
hydraulics of impressions and perceptions:
We must not for the most part look upon Effluviums as swarms of Corpuscles, that
only beat against the outsides of the Bodies they invade, but as Corpuscles, which
by reason of their great and frequently recruited numbers, and by the extreme
Smallness of their Parts, insinuate themselves in multitudes into the minute pores
of the [body].35
His experiments on the retina’s reception of color and on respiration as an ex-

change of substances confirmed what Lucretius had stated most dramatically
of sight, namely that it is the effect of thin films, or what he called effigies,
constantly darted from the surfaces of things and successively striking the eye
or skin; so that what we see or feel is the result of incorporating the substance
of the thing seen or touched. In his essays on effluvia, Boyle attempted to be as
exact as he could about the reciprocal operation of input and output. He said
of effluvia, “they make one part of a living Engin work upon another . . . [so]
as to be very easily affected by external Agents.”36 So the force of the arrival of
an impression allows the organ to magnify and corroborate a succeeding one
by transferring extra energy to the act of perception. Boyle records a vastly
heightened reaction to sights, smells, and sounds, particularly among people
who had been morbidly vulnerable to them before: a lady who swoons at the
smell of roses, a gentleman who can see colors in the dark, another who can
hear whispers a long way off. These redoubled sensations are not representa-
tions, nor do they lodge in the mind as residual signs of what was felt. They are
part of the process of perception itself. So when Lucretius talks of the theatre he
never once mentions representation—the actors, the costumes, or the stage—he
talks instead of the sunlit awnings, and the colors they transfuse to the skins of
the spectators, as if they were human heliotropes, changing hue and direction
in accordance with the light. This is the best account I know of pure experience
of the kind Latour says makes a late appearance in William James’s essays on
radical empiricism.37
Regardless of its experimental advantages, this sort of sensitivity was re-
garded by many as a curse: We could die of a rose in aromatic pain, said Pope;
the skin of our eyes would blister in the light, said Francis Hutcheson.38 Of a
person possessed of morbidly acute sight, Locke had this to say: “He would be
in a quite different World from other People: Nothing would appear the same
to him, and others.”39 He would be cast away on the shores of what Hooke had
enthusiastically hailed as the coasts of “new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s.”40
The empirical flirtation with foreignness and chaos, always edging towards
reverie and madness, reached a high point at the end of the eighteenth century
in the Pneumatic Institute at Bristol, where Humphry Davy, lineal descendent

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of Boyle, began a series of experiments on factitious air called azote oxyd, now
known as nitrous oxide. It acted like an internal prosthesis by sharpening re-
ceptivity to an inordinate degree. Davy found all his senses became preternatu-
rally acute, causing reactions so vivid he could compare them with nothing
else he had ever experienced. He reported that “trains of vivid visible images
rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a
manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel, I existed in a world of newly
connected and newly modified ideas.”41 From a different route he arrived at the
same Terra Incognita Hooke had searched for with machines, and which Rous-
seau discovered in reveries, but despite the omnipotence of his thoughts it was
the world of a solitaire, for he could find no analogies with which to commu-
nicate what he felt. He was engaged in that branch of experiment Ian Hacking
calls “adventure” (as distinct from test, diagnosis, or dissection): “Adventure,”
he says, “is prior to theory. An adventure is an end in itself . . . done for its own
sake.”42 Alchemists and buccaneers like William Dampier were on adventures.
Davy’s ecstatic isolation challenges the confidence with which Latour ar-
ranges the relations of his network nodes, especially those connected to ref-
erence [REF]. Every scientific discovery (he says) is a narrative populated by
imagined characters fit to encounter the experience that the newly discovered
world offers:
No science is possible, and especially no abstract science, unless the world is popu-
lated by these little beings capable of going everywhere, of seeing and submitting
to the most terrible trials, in place of the researcher trapped in her body and immo-
bilized in her laboratory. It is these delegates that we have trusted, since the seven-
teenth century, to go off and travel everywhere. And yet these little emissaries . . .
have to bring something back: it is REFERENCE.43
What does Gulliver, so typical of Latour’s “little beings” especially in his sec-
ond adventure, bring back from his fourth except proof of his madness? If he
acts as a delegate it is on behalf of that compendium of the world, the college
of Bedlam. Talking of the difficulties of marrying scientific journeys to undis-
covered lands to the common world of reference, Boyle had this to say: “Yet
the full discovery of Natures Mysteries, is so unlikely to fall to any mans share
in this Life, that the case of the Pursuers of them is at best like theirs that light
upon some excellent Romance, of which they shall never see the latter parts.”44
Adventures and romances have in common a world formed of contingencies in
which nothing is reliably connected with anything else. News of erotic utopias
brought back by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Philibert Commerson, and
eyewitness accounts of Patagonian giants reported by John Byron and Amédée-
François Frézier, clinched Hooke’s scientific terra incognita to what the net-
workers of New World knowledge such as Peter Heylyn had already named the
region of romance. Romance is experience liberated, said Henry James, “from

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the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vul-
gar communities.”45
I shall leave the question of fiction’s relation to reference suspended briefly
while I turn back to the problem of self-escaping mastery. Serres is right to em-
phasize that modernity’s establishment of collectivities has never produced the
effects that Bacon prophesied would flow from submitting nature to the vexa-
tions of art. Various tell-tales have sported with the paradoxes that foil the sym-
metry of our best plans by heralding the iteration of an historical invariant. In
his 1724 Fable of the Bees Bernard Mandeville explained how evil springs up and
pullulates from evil, how vice contributes to the public good, how chastity is
preserved in direct proportion to the indulgence of lewdness, how inconstancy
mends faults prudence could not possibly have foreseen, and how the refor-
mation of national manners is never compassed without the goad of national
necessity. Later Thomas Malthus, following the same line of thought, pointed
out in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that the pursuit of happi-
ness is the surest road to misery. Each was exhibiting the gulf between how
we make intelligible our own experience in reference to a community and how
communities really work. Nothing adds so much to the verisimilitude of Daniel
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as his candid treatment of the reader
to whom he observes that one man’s rule for self-preservation might well be
another’s, while neither cares twopence how well or ill it works for the other
party. We imagine that honesty, love, and charity knit us together, and forget
that the true bond of society is self-interest and the gratification of the appetites
and the passions. When the shock extends from the sudden recognition of the
imperfections of the social structure to the dangers of the natural world, then
polytheistic religion has its birth, or superstition as Lucretius calls it, the grand
reserve of everything our mastery failed to dominate:
Then when the whole earth trembles beneath our feet; when cities are shaken and
fall or threaten to fall, what wonder if the sons of men feel contempt for them-
selves and acknowledge the great potency and wondrous might of gods in the
world, to govern all things.46
A pitiful resource, according to Hume. Lucretius continues, “O unhappy race

of mankind . . . what groans did they create for themselves . . . what tears for
generations to come!”47 Hume is at sufficient distance from religion to compare
the prosopopeias of the terror-struck with the blandishments of poets, but he
agrees that the unaccountable disorders and convulsions in nature, “though the
most opposite to the plan of a wise superintendent,” are the phenomena most
certain to inspire religious faith because then the intuition of our loneliness and
mortality is at its keenest.48 But this surplus of human imbecility is treated with
a degree of festive unconcern by Latour when he talks of how the moderns
ignored the “sumptuous opacity” of technology, forfeiting the chance of tran-

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scendence offered by the coincidence of minuteness with vastness, of prayer

with what was besought, the human with the god: “the distance separating
what you were from what you have become after being seized by a psycho-
genic being [MET].”49
On this topic Serres tacks away from Lucretius and towards Latour because
he believes that the birth of polytheism coincided with events so sublime that
their witnesses had no choice but to be transfixed by them, and that such a
birth is an historical invariant, likely to be repeated at any time. In that crisis
the imagination discovers just how physics is the science of disturbance, how
history is only violence, and how religion is “charged with describing the ori-
gins of physics.”50 All the nodes of Serres’s non-metrical network (in Latour’s
shorthand [TEC], [REL], [POL], [REF], [SCI], [MET], and so on) neglect to line
up on the coordinates of Latour’s spatialized and non-fluctuating network,
and instead congregate amidst the turbulence of chaos, “the oldest word in the
archeology of the world.”51 Throughout the conversation with Latour, Serres
returns to his polytheistic account of the loss of the Challenger space shuttle in
1986, whose rocket-vehicle exploded shortly after take-off on January 28. He
compares it to the Carthaginian cult of Baal, which required the sacrifice of
children in a tall structure like a rocket. As it burnt the worshippers would call
out that sacrificial animals were being incinerated to ward off accidents and
appease the god, but already the worst accident was taking place, self-inflicted
and concealed by a shallow fiction that nevertheless had to be believed. With
the Challenger, accident and sacrifice were likewise simultaneous, and sheer
bad luck was made accountable by a loss of human life in the cause of science.52
Serres is ready to understand polytheism as a register of tectonic forces erupt-
ing at uncertain intervals through the surface of the plate, leaving singed and
cratered traces of invariance. Latour says to him,
we must absolve you of an unpardonable crime: you mix together Challenger and
Baal, whereas all the work of criticism has been in separating, in distinguishing
what was collective in Baal and what was science and technology in the Challenger.
This is why your anthropology of the sciences remains incomprehensible, in my
opinion.53
Yet Serres was doing no more than investigating the consequences of his earlier
claim that the origins of religion and of physics take place in the same vortex, a
position recently assumed with less turbulence by Latour himself.
Hume understands how important it is in such cataclysms to take account
of the imagination: “Madness, fury, rage, and an inflamed imagination, though
they sink men nearest to the level of beasts, are, for a like reason, often sup-
posed to be the only dispositions, in which we can have any immediate com-
munication with the Deity.”54 Latour would like to ventilate and sweeten this
account of the invention and worship of gods. He is a self-confessed idoladule,

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inclined only to moderate feelings when in company with effigies of deities.

This explains why his taxonomy of iconoclasm is restricted to five types that
not only explain and account for the destruction of idols but also show how
closely the smashing of idols is implicated in the business of constructing and
worshipping images in the first place. Only one of his categories deals with the
feelings of iconoclasts, and these amount to irreverence and disrespect, motives
merely for insolence and irony.55 He pays little heed to the intensity of the pas-
sion and the furor of imagination responsible for the invention and annihilation
of what Hobbes called “the visible creature” of a god.56
This accounts for his irenic treatment of fiction in his Inquiry, despite the
extravagance of the claims made on its behalf: “It is fiction that has made us,”
“the beings of fiction . . . possess a particular type of reality,” “we can never re-
ally tell whether it is the artist or the audience that is creating the work.”57 These
same fictional beings are the delegates and emissaries upon whom we rely for
reference, ever since the seventeenth century. Here the link with Hobbes’s polit-
ical philosophy grows very visible, especially with regard to the importance of
belief in fiction as constitutive of the state and the citizen. All Hobbes required
of fiction invented within the civil state was that it consort with probability,
so that what was feigned might be easily imaginable. Then a vast network
of delegations could come about: the person of the commonwealth would be
represented by the king, the king by his ministers, officers, magistrates, and
priests, and so on down the narrowest capillaries of the political body: “There
are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by Fiction.”58 But what
if fiction were contemptuous of verisimilitude and neglected the business of
representing the real in favor of painting astonishing scenes of valor or cruelty,
or prodigies such as giants and open-air sex, and constructing episodes that
had no more than a contingent relation to each other? What if fiction were re-
ally romance, the genre Henry James called the “fantasy of unrelatedness” that
places the reader in the same suspense that Boyle endured when experiments
would yield no determinate facts?59
In the work of Hume and Henry Home, Lord Kames, radical empiricism
and the capacity to be fully and unreflectively absorbed in the sensation of
things, whether real or fictive, is fully on display. Hume’s empiricism made
available images continuous with sensations that provoked them: “That idea of
red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in
the sun shine, differ only in degree, not in nature.”60 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
was to say something very similar about dreaming and novel reading, where all
reflective powers of mind are suspended and (as he put it) “images act by their
own force as images.”61 Kames had already maintained that images capable of
this degree of self-activity provoked a reverie from which any relative sense of
space and time and any awareness of the distinction between fiction and his-
tory were eliminated.62 This is a state of mind that Ann Radcliffe was able to
introduce to her readers from the inside out, as it were, for when inexplicable

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events begin to overwhelm her heroines they generally find that their reliable
resource of comfort—reading fiction—is rendered useless because there is such
a shortage of facts in their own environment that they are themselves inhabit-
ing a nonreferential world indistinguishable from pure fiction: “Emily’s present
life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those
frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted.
Reflection brought only regret, and anticipation terror.”63 When Isaac Newton
stared at the sun so long that his idea of it was accompanied by an image of it
that would not disappear from his retina, he found himself empirically to be in
the condition of someone under the dominion of imagination. “It may be gath-
ered,” he concluded, “yt the tenderest sight argues ye clearest fantasie of things
visible & hence something of ye nature of madnesse.”64 Fiction that does not
engage the imagination at this level of excitement and turbulence, where a real
disturbance of the brain is the price paid sometimes for “comprehending things
clearly, seeing them clearly”—that is, without a medium or representation—
will incline its readers to sentimentalize the continuity of sensation with the
world, and neglect the messages that Serres’s Hermes fetches from the abraded
surface of the tectonic plate.65 Latour used to call this surprise, the feeling that
what you were doing was happening to you, but some of that surprise is miss-
ing from his Inquiry.66
NOTES
1. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans.
Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, 1995), 171.
2. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 3; Malcolm Bull, “Pure Mediterranean,” London
Review of Books (20 February 2014): 21–23.
3. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 57.
4. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 108–9, 68.
5. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), 88.
7. Latour, Inquiry, 234.
11. Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes, ed. David Webb (Manchester, 2000),
164.
12. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 143.
13. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142.
14. Latour, Pandora’s Hope (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 141.
15. Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2005), 15.
16. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 139, 143, 144.
17. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 22.
18. Serres, Birth of Physics, 164.

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23. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning [1605], ed. G. W. Kitchin (London,
1965), 59–60.
24. Lucretius, T. Lucretius Caro on the Nature of Things (London, 1743), Book 2, line 283.
25. Serres, Birth of Physics, 178, 181.
30. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith, trans. W. H. D.
Rouse (Cambridge, 1997), 315, Book 4, lines 486–89.
32. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689], ed. Peter H. Nid-
ditch (Oxford, 1979), 137.
33. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature [1738], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch
(Oxford, 1978), 1.
34. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into Vulgarly Received Notions of Nature [1686], ed.
Edward Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge, 1996), 127.
35. Boyle, Of the Great Efficacy of Effluviums, [1673], in The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols.,
ed. Davis and Hunter (London, 1999), 7:255–71, 261.
36. Boyle, Of the Great Efficacy of Effluviums, 270, 267.
37. Latour writes: “Let us recall that radical EMPIRICISM, the version that inspired
William James and that this entire inquiry aspires to extend in a more systematic way”
(Inquiry, 236).
38. See Alexander Pope, Essay on Man [1734], in Collected Poems of Alexander Pope, ed.
John Butt (Oxford, 1963), 501–48, Book 1, line 200; and Francis Hutcheson, Essay on the
Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections [1728], ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis,
2002) 119.
39. Locke, Essay, 303.
40. Robert Hooke, Micrographia [1665] (New York, 2003), xvi.
41. Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Cheifly Concerning Nitrous
Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration (Bristol, 1800), 487.
42. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1991), 36.
44. Boyle, The Excellence of Theology compar’d with Natural Philosophy (London, 1671),
119.
45. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B.
Murdock (Chicago, 1947), 31, 33.
46. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book 5, lines 1236–40.
48. Hume, The Natural History of Religion [1757], ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1998), 154.
52. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 138–41.
54. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 154.
55. Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion,
and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 21.
56. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 449.
57. Latour, Inquiry, 247, 238, 242–43.
58. Hobbes, 113.

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59. See Henry James, “Preface to ‘The American,’” in The Art of the Novel (New York
and London, 1947), 20–39.
60. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 3.
61. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Shakespearian Criticism, 2 vols., ed. Thomas
Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, 1930), 1:348.
62. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism [1762], ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols.,
(Indianapolis, 2005), 1:71.
63. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794] (Oxford, 1991), 296–97.
64. Isaac Newton, quoted in Rob Iliffe, “Isaac Newton: Lucatello Professor of Math-
ematics,” in Science Incarnate, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago,
1998), 121–55, 144.
66. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 139–40, 281.

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Bruno Latour_Michel Serres_and Fictions of the Enlightenment

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Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/eighcent.57.2.181

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In a review of T. J. Clark’s book on Pablo Picasso, Malcolm Bull quotes from

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For me “modern” does not mean new, modernist, modernizing. I understand it in

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Representation was managed better, Latour supposes, by the ancient Scandi-

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benefits of believing in it—­its prepositional virtue, as it were, outweighed the

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senses cannot be refuted,” declared Lucretius before producing two rhetorical

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His experiments on the retina’s reception of color and on respiration as an ex-

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A pitiful resource, according to Hume. Lucretius continues, “O unhappy race

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scendence offered by the coincidence of minuteness with vastness, of prayer

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inclined only to moderate feelings when in company with effigies of deities.

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21. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 151.

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benefits of believing in it—its prepositional virtue, as it were, outweighed the