The Latourian Nonhuman and the Unreliable Witness

In "We Have Never Been Modern" Latour sets up the binary opposition of the human and the nonhuman yet never clearly states the distinct difference. He clarifies the human in chapter five, but not the nonhuman. So what does it mean to be nonhuman?

After Latour quotes Shapin and Schaffer, "witnessing as an ineffective and subversive enterprise" (23), he goes on to state, "Witnesses had always been human or divine - never nonhuman. The texts had been written by men or inspired by God - never inspired or written by nonhumans. The law courts had seen countless human and divine trials come and go - never affairs that called into question the behavior of nonhumans in a laboratory transformed into a court of justice" (23).

Later Latour goes on to distinguish the nonhuman as not "capable of showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom will is attributed to but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way" (23).

Is the nonhuman simply the "facts" resulted in scientific expeditions? Or is the nonhuman in fact a human but stripped of rhetorical agency? I assume it is the later. Latour labors on the ideas of scientific method and how the facts speak for themselves and require no human representative. Here is where I think the nonhuman resides. The human representative of scientific fact must appear nonhuman. The human element of scientific inquiry quickly discredits the credibility of its findings due to the stigma of rhetorical agency and unreliable witnesses. Humans are inherently rhetorical, science is not supposed to be.