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In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the
struggle to avert a climate catastrophe. First and foremost,
Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in ‘earthly
things’ and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being
neglected. He also urges Christians to renew their
understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the
world that has emerged from Earth system science – that of a
world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are
interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile
membrane on the surface of the planet. This new image of the
world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics
and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of
Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order. Latour sees the
ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails,
as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience,
the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated
before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great
crisis that looms before us all.
In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour
explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have
changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic
part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all
life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few
kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical
zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are
transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species,
we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our
connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation
between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s
resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on
the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for
Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work
throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social
construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the
Anthropocene.
The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which
took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics
(LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and
philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher
Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending
publication of Harman's book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and
Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the 'Prince') compared
the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years
to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what
happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman
engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to
the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are
objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them?
In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the
struggle to avert a climate catastrophe. First and foremost,
Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in ‘earthly
things’ and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being
neglected. He also urges Christians to renew their
understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the
world that has emerged from Earth system science – that of a
world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are
interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile
membrane on the surface of the planet. This new image of the
world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics
and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of
Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order. Latour sees the
ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails,
as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience,
the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated
before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great
crisis that looms before us all.
In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour
explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have
changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic
part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all
life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few
kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical
zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are
transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species,
we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our
connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation
between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s
resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on
the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for
Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work
throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social
construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the
Anthropocene.
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time,
Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual
context for political ecology-transplanting the terms of ecology
into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus
far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically:
"Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this
jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American
parks." Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of
reality, is a way of assembling political order without due
process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy
between nature and society-and the constitution, in its place, of a
collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and
building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually
practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value,
Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy
implicated in such a "commonsense" division-which here reveals
itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to
democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving
beyond the modernist institutions of "mononaturalism" and
"multiculturalism," Latour develops the idea of "multinaturalism,"
a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming
absolute reason but by "diplomats" who are flexible and open to
experimentation.
What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant
scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for
Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade
them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination?
Pasteur's success depended upon a whole network of forces,
including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both
military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial
interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with
the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime
example of science in action.
Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his
methodology must be understood within the particular historical
convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests.
Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships
of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other
forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur's efforts
to win over the French public--the farmers, industrialists,
politicians, and much of the scientific establishment.
Instead of reducing science to a given social environment,
Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its
scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the
story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science
whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case
study. In the second part of the book, "Irreductions," Latour sets
out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the
"relation of forces." Latour's method of analysis cuts across and
through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology,
history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is
possible not to make the distinction between reason and force.
Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads
to an unexpected irreductionism.
Over the past twenty-five years, Bruno Latour has developed a
research protocol different from the actor-network theory with
which his name is now associated-a research protocol that follows
the different types of connectors that provide specific truth
conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate
scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the
institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains
of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority.
Such modes of extension-or modes of existence, Latour argues
here-account for the many differences between law, science,
politics, and other domains of knowledge. "Magnificent...An Inquiry
into Modes of Existence shows that [Latour] has lost none of his
astonishing fertility as a thinker, or his skill and wit as a
writer...Latour's main message-that rationality is 'woven from more
than one thread'-is intended not just for the academic seminar, but
for the public square-and the public square today is global as
never before." -Jonathan Ree, Times Literary Supplement "Latour's
work makes the world-sorry, worlds-interesting again." -Stephen
Muecke, Los Angeles Review of Books
Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our
society, yet their working remains little understood. The
conventional perception of science in Western societies has been
modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, sociologists
and historians of science. In this book Bruno Latour brings
together these different approaches to provide a lively and
challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context
and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding
of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be
understood through its practice, the author examines science and
technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the
activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in
the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries
become accepted. From the study of scientific practice he develops
an analysis of science as the building of networks. Throughout,
Bruno Latour shows how a lively and realistic picture of science in
action alters our conception of not only the natural sciences but
also the social sciences and the sociology of knowledge in general.
This stimulating book, drawing on a wealth of examples from a
wide range of scientific activities, will interest all
philosophers, sociologists and historians of science, scientists
and engineers, and students of the philosophy of social science and
the sociology of knowledge.
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed
irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern
ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno
Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an
anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually
a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference
does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains,
is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between
human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in
their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But
alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there
exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems
that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone
debate is such a hybrid, in Latour s analysis, as are global
warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these
hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in
their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming and rather than
try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink
the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book
offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the
connections between nature and culture and so, between our culture
and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our
mental landscape. "We Have Never Been Modern" blurs the boundaries
among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance
understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the
most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims
at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the
rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.
Architecture is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called
imaging. Yet the technical status and nature of that imaging must
be reevaluated. What happens to the architectural mind when it
stops pretending that electronic images of drawings made by
computers are drawings? When it finally admits that imaging is not
drawing, but is instead something that has already obliterated
drawing? These are questions that, in general, architecture has
scarcely begun to pose , imagining that somehow its ideas and
practices can resist the culture of imaging in which the rest of
life now either swims or drowns. To patiently describe the world to
oneself is to prepare the ground for an as yet unavailable
politics. New descriptions can, under the right circumstances, be
made to serve as the raw substrate for political impulses that
cannot yet be expressed or lived, because their preconditions have
not been arranged and articulated. Signal. Image. Architecture.
aims to clarify the status of computational images in contemporary
architectural thought and practice by showing what happens if the
technical basis of architecture is examined very closely, if its
technical terms and concepts are taken very seriously, at times
even literally. It is not a theory of architectural images, but
rather a brief philosophical description of architecture after
imaging.
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a
deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the
culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary
criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory
produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision
of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time
being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work
done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk
Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of
modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of
science.
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that
the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies
theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been
Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal
scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from
their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the
"belief in naive belief," the suggestion that fetishes-objects
invested with mythical powers-are fabricated and that facts are
not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses
the notion of "factishes" to explore a way of respecting the
objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting
that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows
perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker
inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at
the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or
the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the
fabricated and the real, through the notion of "iconoclash," making
productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship
of visual images and religious icons.
A scientist friend asked Bruno Latour point-blank: "Do you
believe in reality?" Taken aback by this strange query, Latour
offers his meticulous response in "Pandora's Hope." It is a
remarkable argument for understanding the reality of science in
practical terms.
In this book Latour, identified by Richard Rorty as the new
"bete noire of the science worshipers," gives us his most
philosophically informed book since "Science in Action." Through
case studies of scientists in the Amazon analyzing soil and in
Pasteur's lab studying the fermentation of lactic acid, he shows us
the myriad steps by which events in the material world are
transformed into items of scientific knowledge. Through many
examples in the world of technology, we see how the material and
human worlds come together and are reciprocally transformed in this
process.
Why, Latour asks, did the idea of an independent reality, free
of human interaction, emerge in the first place? His answer to this
question, harking back to the debates between Might and Right
narrated by Plato, points to the real stakes in the so-called
science wars: the perplexed submission of ordinary people before
the warring forces of claimants to the ultimate truth.
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing
climate change.This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition
at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of
life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation
to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land
on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which
they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they
gain their wealth--the land they live on, and the land they live
from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe,
not the iconic "blue marble," but a series of critical
zones--patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous. With short pieces,
longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors
explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to
land--what it means to be "on Earth," whether the critical zone,
the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts
and tools redesigned for the new "geopolitics of life forms." The
"thought exhibition" described in this book can opens a fictional
space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is
unknown. Contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre
Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerome Gaillarde,
Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers,
Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A.
Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski Copublished with ZKM Center for
Art and Media Karlsruhe
Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a
technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of
Aramis-the guided-transportation system intended for Paris-is told
in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several
different parties: an engineer and his professor; company
executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis
itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological
innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young
engineer and professor follow Aramis's trail-conducting interviews,
analyzing documents, assessing the evidence-perspectives keep
shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable,
comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This
charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study,
is Latour at his thought-provoking best.
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Reset Modernity! (Hardcover)
Bruno Latour, Christophe LeClercq
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Texts and images document the disconnection between modernity and
ecological crisis: do we need to reset modernity's operating
system? Modernity has had so many meanings and tries to combine so
many contradictory sets of attitudes and values that it has become
impossible to use it to define the future. It has ended up crashing
like an overloaded computer. Hence the idea is that modernity might
need a sort of reset. Not a clean break, not a "tabula rasa," not
another iconoclastic gesture, but rather a restart of the
complicated programs that have been accumulated, over the course of
history, in what is often called the "modernist project." This
operation has become all the more urgent now that the ecological
mutation is forcing us to reorient ourselves toward an experience
of the material world for which we don't seem to have good
recording devices. Reset Modernity! is organized around six
procedures that might induce the readers to reset some of those
instruments. Once this reset has been completed, readers might be
better prepared for a series of new encounters with other cultures.
After having been thrown into the modernist maelstrom, those
cultures have difficulties that are just as grave as ours in
orienting themselves within the notion of modernity. It is not
impossible that the course of those encounters might be altered
after modernizers have reset their own way of recording their
experience of the world. At the intersection of art, philosophy,
and anthropology, Reset Modernity! has assembled close to sixty
authors, most of whom have participated, in one way or another, in
the Inquiry into Modes of Existence initiated by Bruno Latour.
Together they try to see whether such a reset and such encounters
have any practicality. Much like the two exhibitions Iconoclash and
Making Things Public, this book documents and completes what could
be called a "thought exhibition:" Reset Modernity! held at ZKM |
Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from April to August 2016. Like
the two others, this book, generously illustrated, includes
contributions, excerpts, and works from many authors and artists.
Contributors Jamie Allen, Terence Blake, Johannes Bruder, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Philip Conway, Michael Cuntz, Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, Didier Debaise, Gerard de Vries, Philippe Descola, Vinciane
Despret, Jean-Michel Frodon, Martin Giraudeau, Sylvain Gouraud,
Lesley Green, Martin Guinard-Terrin, Clive Hamilton, Graham Harman,
Antoine Hennion, Andres Jaque, Pablo Jensen, Bruno Karsenti, Sara
Keel, Oleg Kharkhordin, Joseph Leo Koerner, Eduardo Kohn, Bruno
Latour, Christophe Leclercq, Vincent-Antonin Lepinay, James
Lovelock, Patrice Maniglier, Claudia Mareis, Claude Marzotto, Kyle
McGee, Lorenza Mondada, Pierre Montebello, Stephen Muecke, Cyril
Neyrat, Cormac O'Keeffe, Hans Ulrich Obrist, P3G, John Palmesino,
Nicolas Prignot, Donato Ricci, Ann-Sofi Roennskog, Maia Sambonet,
Henning Schmidgen, Isabelle Stengers, Hanna Svensson, Thomas
Thwaites, Nynke van Schepen, Consuelo Vasquez, Peter Weibel,
Richard White, Aline Wiame, Jan Zalasiewicz Exhibition April 10,
2016-August 21, 2016 ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Edited by Bruno Latour with Christophe Leclerc Copublished with ZKM
| Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe
How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the
question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end
of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent
Antonin Lepinay offer a lively introduction to the work of that
forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde's
solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his
time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you
need to grasp 'passionate interests'. In Tarde's view, capitalism
is not a system of cold calculations - rather it is a constant
amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning
anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde's work
defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible
for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the
devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility
of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom
everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable. At a time when
the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated
debate, Latour and Lepinay provide a valuable historical
perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.
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