Tag: Bruno Latour

• Door-hinges and obligatory passage points

  ‘I constantly talk with my computer, who answers back; I am sure you swear at your old car; we are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance, not to mention cracks in the concrete belt of our nuclear plants. Yet, this behaviour is considered by moralists, I mean sociologists, as a scandalous breach of natural barriers…They call such a projection anthropomorphism, which for them is a sin akin to zoophily but much worse.’

  Latour (1988: 303)

  Another fantastic quote from Latour, this time on the ‘scandalous’ anthropomorphic tendencies of, well, all of us. It’s from his 1988 article in Social Problems, ‘Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer’, which is probably the most entertaining reading of how a door-hinge works in perhaps all of time. It’s available here to download, and was part of a special issue of that journal on the sociology of science and technology.

  2012.09.24

• Moved…

  onto Latour’s ‘Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence’, again, available to download on Latour’s own website. It really is just a biographical account of how he ended up where he his. He talks through his various encounters with scientists, ethnographers and philosophers, as well as his early life as a ‘militant Catholic student’, and the development of his projects. Here’s a nice quote Latour pulls out when talking about the effect Isabelle Stengers had on his work :

  ‘Even Pasteur’s microbes, even Aramis’s magnetic couplings, the automated subway system, even Michel Callon’s famous scallops, all of them undeniably present, actants and movers, glittering with reality, still didn’t offer, in Stengers’ eyes, a sufficient guarantee that we had pulled ourselves away from the text, the social, the symbolic. To manage that, we would have had to grasp the world without dragging through it human subjects and their obsession with knowledge conceived as the relation between words and things.’

  Latour (2012: 15)

   

  2012.09.24

• Latour Day!

  Today is offically Latour Day! At least for me it is. This morning I really struggled to start writing anything, despite getting up early, so I’ve designated today to be a Latour day. Think I’ll read through some articles I’ve never come across or indeed not read for a while. I’ll post some public links up throughout the day, starting with ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – An Introduction to Making Things Public’ which is available to download at Latour’s homepage. I’ll also post a ‘killer quote’ that encapsulates that article’s main argument, so here is that quote from Dingpolitik:

  ‘The point of reviving this old etymology [of thing or ‘ding’] is that we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement’.

  Latour (2005: 13).

  There’s also another classic Latour passage but I’ll save that for myself.

  2012.09.24

• More Latour

  Another quick link; this time to a video of Bruno Latour’s lecture on digital societies at Goldsmiths. Available here.

  2012.06.14

• Elden, Harman, Latour

  Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies is one of a few academic blogs I return to on a near-daily basis. Surfing from personal insights into the academic work process to book releases, video links and conference details, Elden provides a rich stream of content across Political, Geographical and Philosophical spheres. There are recurring figures most weeks; Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant and Peter Sloterdijk pop up frequently. As does Graham Harman; a feverish blogger himself over at his Object-Oriented Philosophy page. Elden’s latest post is a re-blogged interview with Harman over at The Loyal Opposition to Modernity that can be read here. As Harman is a big reader of Bruno Latour, he brings his name up in conversation, alluding to his appeal to anthropologists, geographers and sociologists over philosophers. Harman also talks of his lethargy with purely relational concepts (in metaphysical terms and then political arenas). In particular Harman says;

  Now that relations and events have become king in continental philosophy, these battles have largely been won. Rather than endlessly using these theories to beat up the decreasing number of reactionary holdouts, we ought to take a closer look at the problems with relationality itself.

  ‘Metaphysical essentialism’, he says later, ‘is politically harmless, but epistemological essentialism is not’. So two problems with essence? The idea that it can be directly known (rather than obliquely), and is eternal (a-historical).

  Another great quote is on Deleuzian thought within Continental Philosophy:

  We are well into the “Deleuze is compatible with everyone and foresaw everything” phase, the lack of a challenging outside, which always announces the closing decadence of any philosopher’s vogue; Derrideanism got this way by the early 1990’s. And now the Deleuze industry is finally on the point of overheating and excess inventory, and soon there will be layoffs and plant closures.

  Latour, as Harman argues, is certainly no Deleuzian (too much flux not enough formation). Harman’s Prince of Networks, from 2009, is a good starting point for thinking about Latour as a philosopher, and how Harman’s own Object-Oriented Philosophy can work with Latour’s Actor-Networks. It’s available as a free pdf from here, but also well worth buying.  

  2012.06.02