Laboratory Life

Latour manages a book that is both highly theoretical and intensely detailed. Written at one of the high points of the post-modern turn in STS, and deeply involved in the Strong Programme to explain successful and unsuccessful science in the same way, Laboratory Life shows how abstruse theory and ethnography can mutually support each other. Latour spent 21 months as a participant-observer in a neuro-endocrinology lab, and from his time develops a comprehensive picture of the scientific process as an act of rhetorical destruction--eliminating alternatives until only one is left, scientists as economic-strategic actors seeking to increase their stock of 'credit' in the community, and science as a difficult struggle to make Order out of show more Chaos.

It's interesting seeing the evolution of Latour's thought from Laboratory Life to Science in Action to We Have Never Been Modern. You see facticity as an historical construct assembled out of a whole textus of inscriptions, but the later Latour dropped the idea of 'credit' as a reward (perhaps it is not analytic enough, but to me, it does describe the difference between a decent scholar and great one), and the whole notion of We Have Never Been Modern, that the Enlightenment goal of separating the world of science from the world of politics, and the world of humans from the world of nature is doomed to failure, is not yet evident. Though Latour still makes it very clear how contextual science is, in this book at least, he seems to believe that the work of science might yet succeed in making the entire world legible. show less

This anthropological study of scientists is at times thought-provoking and at times, it seems, intentionally obtuse. Latour and Woolgar's argument on the construction of facts (rather than their discovery) is well supported; their portrayal of the chaos of the daily life in a lab, in which "scientific reality is a pocket of order, created out of disorder by seizing on any signal which fits what has already been enclosed and by encolosing it, albeit at a cost", is useful and fair. But their dismissal of epistemologists that have addressed the same issues is unwarranted, their flirting with relativism is irresponsible, and their emphasis on literary inscriptions (scientific papers) and career advancement, paired with their dismissal of show more the meaning of those inscriptions and of any motivations of scientists beyond social recognition, are fundamentally misguided. show less

Intentionally provocative, but worth the stretch.

This book made me become a scientist, for better or for worse