Bruno Latour’s Second Theory of Cosmopolitics and the Star Trek Cosmogram

Abstract

In the last 30 years, a body of scholarly works has emerged to account for a new form of politics known as “cosmopolitics”. Bruno Latour is one exponent with his compositionist theory, masterfully developed in Politics of Nature, which defines politics as reality fabrication and emphasises the capture of politics by science since the Greeks. A few years later, Latour decided to revisit his theorisation of cosmopolitics using the notion of cosmograms, a specific type of imaginaries, but in rather idiosyncratic manner. Although still claiming to be studying the politics/science interface, his second theory of cosmopolitics appears to break from compositionism in stripping science from its unique political function, and lacks internal consistency. To illustrate and flesh out this new theory, Latour picks the case of astronomy’s discovery of exoplanets. Unfortunately, when taken in its stringent definition and applied to exoplanets, the notion of cosmogram makes his case crumble. If one chooses to study politics in terms of imaginaries as Latour does in his second theory of cosmopolitics, then science fiction appears to have more political traction than science, as exemplified by the Star Trek cosmogram.