In keeping with the reading for the week, I'm not going to pose one particular question. Instead, I invite you to comment on one particular point in the book that provokes you and that would be grist for some conversation in class on Thursday. Be prepared to discuss your comment/question when we meet. ************************************************************************ I found Latour's essay inspiring, mysterious, and irreverent. I totally agree with his claim that we have never been modern. His diagrams and his writing, even in the english translation, helped me to clarify and resolve certain inquiries that I have had about what has been called "modern world." The method and style of the essay allowed Latour to build an elegant argument that logically revealed the non existence of the modern beings. By describing the Constitution of Modernity, pointing out its paradoxes, asymmetries, hybrids and monsters, he demonstrates that we have never been "truly modern." Latour makes a powerful call to assume our nonmodernity by practicing a comparative anthropology that will allow us to recognize the links, the relationships, the networks between nature-cultures (nature-societies), human-nonhumans, translation/mediation-purification. His call is also a sort of manifesto for a more holistic and irreducible humanism ("weaver of morphisms"), for the freedom of sorting our own temporality, and extending democracy to things ("Parliament of things"). For our discussion, I would like to talk about the final remarks of Latour's essay. What are the steps to arrive to a democracy extended to things? What can of deliberative processes could we have in such scenario? I would also like to talk about other applications of the comparative anthropology methodology. for instance, how it would look if we applied this method to the study of recent technologies such as the internet. ******************************************************* LECTURE describing a network : describing the relationship examples of it comes into play what is natural and what is social? is it natural? the hybrids are coming fast and furious category of hybrids :: argument about 3 poles: nature, society, discourse >>> limitations and opportunities depending ho modernity cracking nature-society>> enlightment breed of nature >> naturalization, fact field nature, empirical method >> -highlights the idea of the separation -examples to break appart the notion of knowledge and scientific approach collectives :: trying to expand the notion of society and the social, bringing to the collective the non humans >>> the colective as social/culture-nature. hetereogenous assembleges of diverse object acting and reacting to one another the social does not live in asolation objective fact base world should not deny that things are real society should not deny that we are in constant engagement with non humans ability of actors to make other actors to make other actors do unexpected things :: active actors in constant trasnsformations, relations >> network as dynamic interaction >> not stable relationships -suggest thinking of discourse in a different way ::: discursive strategy, a narration :: constructed narration 1989: berlin wall, global warming questions who allow us to confront where nature is? separation of nature also separate us from other humans cyborg, hybrid :: process of purification :: creating boundaries, being pure about the subsets of believes, >>> way of having power : : knowledge power networks :: element of impredictability, non linearity, heterogenous, what is wrong with the mondern Constitution? process and framework of nature-society separation. -emptiness in one that is complemented for the other one >> science, politics -separation between scientific power and political power. >>> what is the force that has separated society and nature for so long? -function of the separation p.51 hybrids could be anything like the institution of a mcdonalds in a developing country hybrids converge in a point called the nonmodern direction work of purification separate us more and more >>> networks : heterogeneous, process, technologies can be link to other techs as well to other humans agency of non humans failure has to be part of this>>> success and failure sceince has the real in front of it >>> creation of a new Constitution >>>posmods :: extreme relativism can non human entities have power? >>> can have determinant power, can we plug into networks for being use for others, the actact : every element in the system the actor: elements with agency good metaphores historical purifization >> looking for ways of mixing up things ********************************************************** Elegant argument. human and non human comparative anthropology how we can study modern media and at the same time make the connections with the miracolous, the religious, the obscure how can we bring back those obscure believes that surround us for instance, the study of the ether re-reading modernity holistic and comparative understanding anthropology of media >>> How can we applied his methodology of comparative anthopology to the study of media? sociology of science? sociology of technology? of media stop separating, integral analysis comparative anthropology and media studies fields of interaction :: find parents more like an ontological conception of bringing things to the >>> intersection, meeting points ::: seing objects in various points of time ::: type of examination there are no final clauses only contengious quasi-object :: conected to other systems fundamental aspects that grew up from the philosophy >> actor-network methodology translation ::: identifying the actors and actants in the networkd study techonology as a system, process, not static, goes in multiple directions ******************* ACTOR NETWORK THEORY :: Michael Callon's THe study of technology as a tool of sociological analysis networks of associations creating new points of intersection one event pops and entire new arrange of associations shifting points of intersection categories are interpenetrating >>> categories become blur >>> categorical mindset does not work very well when analysing technology >>> escape the boundaries :: it is not just the goverment, or just the industry classic social construction simplification and juxtaposition explosions >>> new sites of interaction :: the electric car will intersect city counsils and the city counsil will create stations for the community and so and so... > one simple goal gets juxtaposed to something else. systems and the broader environment >> cannot be separated the field notion a new methodological tool : it is the network what becomes the focus of the study. you cannot see all the network :: the network has permutations :: movement of time :: changes >> like a process >> like a kaleidoscope points of conflict :: where actors collide, different points of view engineers as sociologist how do you define innovation ??? something was before always ::: not linear :: puts the innovation in the middle of the network, relationships interdisciplinary :: puts us outside of desciplines what is different from social constructionims? social constructionism :: social categories, ignores the network relationships, have power over the direction over the shape of technology actor network :: puts objects in important relationships, technologies afford certain opportunities, active role ********************************************************************* I've just read this book for my study, the book is actually quite nice. Latour's main point is that the so called 'modern constitution' has a double tongue. the moderns try to split the entire world into two parts: the society-part and the nature part. On the one hand society is created by nature: our wishes and actions are governed by the universal laws of nature. on the other hand nature itself is a social construction: The facts are "created" in laboratories as a result of our wishes and demands and social structures play a mayor role in what we come to call the truth. (read Collin's "detecting gravitational radiation" if this sounds strange to you) The moderns can switch from the first view to the second at will because they hide the fact that in fact we should speak of hybrid constructions. Every effort to reduce a certain event to either social factors or natural laws is wrong: we must look at the events in their complex hybrid structure because every single event or thing is somewhere in between nature and society. The moderns have always hidden this fact and thats precicely what makes them so strong. --------- Latour is a textbook case of the poverty of modern sociology in general. If people dislike others trying to understand the world rationally, why do people like Latour bother doing sociology at all? The social world has enough "theologists" as it is. Perhaps "theologists" is the wrong expression for the so-called "social theorists" - more like "mob metaphysicians". That was the whole point of sociology in the first place - to replace dogma with fact. The world has enough "experts" of "human nature" as it is, based on ideological claptrap. But it could be the case that sociology has totally failed. Note that Latour's philosophy makes any social enquiry utterly impossible. The philosophy of self-destruction, if you like - the people that do a subject and pull the carpet away from their own feet. ------ Latour's target is the nature/society dualism, rather than the fact/value dualism. It maybe the case that the fact/value distinction is built on the nature/society one. I might go further and say the fact/value distinction is a worthless investigation without the nature/society issue, which is more of a "cosmological" problem. Note that without the nature/society dualism, then there cannot be a social science, and it makes no sense to call a science either a natural one or a social one. The whole thing is undermined. That is exactly why Latour is a "suicidal" philosopher. He is a sociologist who argues that he has no subject. I cannot remember fully his gibberish but I think he thinks that the concept of nature is socially constructed, so "everything" is social (which makes the concept of social virtually meaningless) ------------------ For him, saying that all of science in a social construction is just as wrong as having a holy faith in the rationality and objectivity of science. it's this whole distinction between nature and society that he's trying to destroy. What Latour wants is an understanding of science as it is formed. Neither nature nor society has the "last say", but it's exactly the mutual dependence and influence wich make science happen. When Latour, in another article, describes the "discovery" of the anthrax-baccilus by Pasteur he describes how on the one hand the needs of society make Pasteur investigate this. On the other hand, when Pasteur is investigating the baccilus, he is in fact changing it. He's changing it because he turns around the balance of power: In the complex, outside world tha baccilus can not even be identified as te cause of the disease amongst cows. In the laboratory however Pasteur is capable of making the baccilus behave how he wants it to. If you can't see how that changes the baccilus remember that for Latour everything exists solely in its relation with other things. The baccilus is now changed because it's role in French society will never be the same. So by investigating the baccilus Pasteur has, in fact, changed it! Latour doesn't want to attack science here, in fact there's nothing bad in how science comes to be. What he wants to change however is that after this process the moderns tend to "forget" that they have in part constructed the facts and pretend that the facts have always as existed. Science is right the way it is BUT the way that it comes to be should not be hidden. Latour's definition of "modern" is that the modern constitution creates "above table" a dichotomy between nature and society. However it gets its strength from "below the table" where these dichotomies arent there but everything is build up as a complex network of humans and non-humans. That's why he says "we have never been modern", This dichotomy has never been real! Latour only wants us to get "above table" what has untill now been hidden "below the table" places science and technology into its social context. ------------ ambitious, original, and important reformulations of social theory emerging field of "science studies", the history and sociology of science, In "We Have Never Been Modern," he conscisely summarizes the theoretical basis of his work, and stakes out ground that is genuinely new. The book should excite humanisitic academics, scientists, and intellectually adventurous people from all walks of life with a taste for theory. The thesis -- the basis for the "we have never been modern" part -- is that the "great divide" between nature and human, subject and object, science and society, was never real. Instead, he says, this subject/object divide was the great dirty fiction of the "modern" world. the separation of nature and human, that has marked Western intellectual life since the 17th century, allowed both science and the humanities to make their own claims for absolute truth. This divide was the basis for our image of "modern western man." But these claims hid the fact that "hybrids" were springing up all the while. Modernity also spawned technological "quasi-objects" that blur the line between the natural and the human. The tremendous multiplication of these "quasi-objects" (Latour's neologism)in our times has finally forced us to the point where we are at a startling conclusion: the divorce of man from nature never really took place. What we thought of as scientific Western man was never real. Latour wants us, the generation left with the consequences of this revelation, to exhume this past of hybridity, and seek out a new relationship between nature and culture. In short, he wants to both humanize science and render the humanities more scientific.