The article, by Stephen Shapin (another famous figure in the history of science / STS) is actually mostly about Latour’s Catholicism — something nobody in the field remembers. (I had to read a lot of Latour back in the day, and I’d always assumed he was non religious like most late 20th century intellectuals.) According to Shapin, the Catholicism, together with the climate emergency, is at the heart of his “seriousness”, although apparently he didn’t really do “belief” per se:
> in his own words, religion was not to do with “belief.” God was not an entity you believed in: God did not exist outside of the practices—what Bruno called “the processions and rituals” that make Him present. That is, God is made manifest in an actor-network of religiosity.
The other interesting things you learn here is that Latour was from the famous Latour wine family, he was a youngest son so his family kind of expected him to enter the church, and they were apparently unimpressed and uninterested in his academic career.
> Much of his writing resists analysis while encouraging repetition and undeformed travel.
Sums it up pretty nicely. I have no clue what "undeformed travel" means, which is a nice reference to how his writing resists analysis. His writing does seem to encourage repetition in a lot of people who are not into logic or proper reasoning.
If you say a lot, keep things extremely vague, and change definitions as you go, you attract a lot of people who think, "Hey, this is exactly what I was pondering about," but you also oppose those who think, "Hey, you are not making any sense." I tried to find a middle ground because the subject matter Latour talked about seems very important to our society, but until now, I have consistently failed to like his way of philosophizing.
After having worked with Latour (for two years, on his last exhibition and my artistic research), I got the feeling that he is much more a speaking philosopher, rather than a writing one. I found his speeches easier to grok and, once I started treating his books as speeches, they too became easier to understand.
Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.
Latour’s not so hard to grok, certainly much easier than the Deleuzes and Derridas of the world. Approach his work as more or less philosophical anthropology rather than, like, pure philosophy. Indeed, humans a situated in overlapping spaces and how we make meaning in those spaces is at the heart of his work, from Lab Life through Actor Network Theory. What makes him easier to grok, and set him a little bit apart, is that he steadfastly refused to deny that there was a reality other than the socially constructed ones we make/negotiate. So you have to really pay attention to particular contexts and study it very carefully in order to understand what’s happening in that space. It’s not just social constructivism all the way down.
(He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)
I read two thirds of "Changer de société, refaire de la sociologie" and it was a hard read, most of what he wrote didn't make sense or wasn't well illustrated. It didn't seem like he wanted me to understand his points, nor take me on a laborious journey where my way of seeing things would be transformed
Or Latour and the others really are just pseudo thinkers, maybe they have some things to say but it is muddied and bloated by all the wrong (Not Even Wrong) things they are saying, and history might judge the French postmodernists for taking the wrong path.
I say this as someone who used to be partial toward postmodernist texts, and defended them using arguments similar to yours (they should be understood in this other way!), but I eventually, finally moved on, and I (in my opinion) deem them to be at their worst harmful to critical thinking.
Regarding Latour specifically there is hate-paper on his work, a professor published a paper describing exactly why Latour is problematic bullshit.
Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.
I think what bothers you is the poetical aspect of this text (in the sense of Jakobson's function of language, which boils down to, quoting wikipedia, focusing on "the message for its own sake"). This seems to fit what is said elsewhere in the article:
>He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.”
This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it:
>The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside
Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique.
Some quotes from the book [1]:
>[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter.
Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger.
>Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way.
I can agree with the "lyrical philosopher" quote, but for anyone with a background in science that think that Bruno Latour was a "serious man", I suggest reading the book that made him famous: "Science in Action". It's so bad that it's funny. Out of his 7 rules for studying experimental science, the third one is outstanding:
> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Science in Action)
Bruno Latour was among the selected few that were criticized in Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science".
Facile dismissal of a philosopher is easy. Understanding what they are trying to do, especially when it’s in a very different intellectual tradition from what you’re used to, is the hard thing. I could read Plato, Hegel, Wittgenstein, whoever, and pull the same trick you did by finding some provocative quote that’s impossible to put in context without a detailed explanation of what the guy was up to.
For what it’s worth, I trained in theoretical physics and also read a fair bit of Latour later on. I don’t really like his work all that much, and wish he would be clearer sometimes, but the guy wasn’t an idiot, at least start from there.
In philosophy the usual advice when approaching someone’s work for the first time is to suspend critique on the first reading and just try and take them seriously and understand what they were doing on their own terms. Then you can go back and apply the critical razor later. It’s a useful tool to apply to other areas of life too.
This is actually one of those sophisticated bullshit meta arguments used to defend any sort of intellectual garbage. "You have to see things from their context, intentions, history". No, we do not. And there is no authority that says we must save/suspend our skepticism for later. In fact your entire argument is self contradictory in that respect, by positioning the OP as engaging in"facile dismissal" in the first place! Right? This is a precise example of the awful, pernicious mental gymnastics that bad philosophy produces. Someone well-read with advanced formal education should have realized that right away.
> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.
I don't understand why you find this so objectionable.
If I grasp Latour's point, the settlement of a controversy fixes an understanding of nature at a particular point (the causal effect). It seems sensible then to forbid that understanding of nature to be used as an explanation for why the controversy was settled. Doing that would affix an absoluteness to the understanding that's unjustified, given the empirical approach. At some point in the future some new anomaly in the understanding (Nature) will be discovered, leading to a controversy, empirical science will resolve it, and a new understanding will be synthesized; handing us a representation. It's probably better than the earlier representation, but it's still not all of Nature.
"The basic trouble with much of Latour’s writings—as with those of some other sociologists and philosophers of a “social constructivist” bent—is that these texts are often ambiguous and can be read in at least two distinct ways: a “moderate” reading, which leads to claims that are either worth discussing or else true but trivial; and a “radical” reading, which leads to claims that are surprising but false. Unfortunately, the radical interpretation is often taken not only as the “correct” interpretation of the original text but also as a well-established fact"
I've had him as a sociology teacher in the early 2000s, specifically on this subject (controversies).
It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...).
It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...
> (controversial) stance on the scientific method.
That stance is well-covered here.[1]
Some of the problems in science come from experiments too close to the noise threshold. This is most of social science and psychology. The hard-line position is Rutherford's "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."
Related to this is Hoyle's "Science is prediction, not explanation."
For phenomena that led to useful engineering, repeatability and predictability are very good.
Otherwise the products won't work.
People tend to forget this, because controversial research topics are often close to the noise threshold. It something turns out to be real, and you can get it to happen further from the threshold, it becomes routine engineering. It's then no longer controversial. Your result gets a few lines in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. This sort of science makes the world go.
Philip K. Dick's “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” remains useful.
Taking this hard-line position is useful, because humans are evolved and wired to see patterns near the noise threshold. This is a useful survival strategy for detecting predators in the brush, even with a high false-alarm rate.
Once past survival level, it's less useful.
> The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside.
I like to think we humans are also part of nature, therefore our work, and our creations, cannot be so clearly separated from nature. In the same manner, the work of bees and ants can also be called artificial, in the sense that they practice a craft and manipulate the natural world around them. For me it's all on the same spectrum.
Not again, please let me forget that my country spawned the worst kind of flim-flam nothing-to-say-but-in-a-lot-of-words intellectuals that would disgust any proper philosopher pondering about actually life relevant questions in clear language.
"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep", as some mustachioed German once properly described.
Are you referring to Bruno Latour or the author of the post? If you're referring to Latour, I would strongly urge you to read "Laboratory Life", which is [as] clear and easy to read today as it was when I first encountered it nearly 20 years ago.
(You can tell he's a continental philosopher because this is five times as long as it should be due to every sentence being filled with synonyms.)
Of course, he also once said that Ramses II couldn't have died of tuberculosis because science hadn't invented the concept of "dying of tuberculosis" yet.
Readit News
> in his own words, religion was not to do with “belief.” God was not an entity you believed in: God did not exist outside of the practices—what Bruno called “the processions and rituals” that make Him present. That is, God is made manifest in an actor-network of religiosity.
The other interesting things you learn here is that Latour was from the famous Latour wine family, he was a youngest son so his family kind of expected him to enter the church, and they were apparently unimpressed and uninterested in his academic career.
Sums it up pretty nicely. I have no clue what "undeformed travel" means, which is a nice reference to how his writing resists analysis. His writing does seem to encourage repetition in a lot of people who are not into logic or proper reasoning.
If you say a lot, keep things extremely vague, and change definitions as you go, you attract a lot of people who think, "Hey, this is exactly what I was pondering about," but you also oppose those who think, "Hey, you are not making any sense." I tried to find a middle ground because the subject matter Latour talked about seems very important to our society, but until now, I have consistently failed to like his way of philosophizing.
Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.
(He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)
I say this as someone who used to be partial toward postmodernist texts, and defended them using arguments similar to yours (they should be understood in this other way!), but I eventually, finally moved on, and I (in my opinion) deem them to be at their worst harmful to critical thinking.
Regarding Latour specifically there is hate-paper on his work, a professor published a paper describing exactly why Latour is problematic bullshit.
>He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.”
This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it:
>The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside
Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique.
Some quotes from the book [1]:
>[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter.
Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger.
>Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way.
Heidegger
[1]https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Cont...
> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Science in Action)
Bruno Latour was among the selected few that were criticized in Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science".
For what it’s worth, I trained in theoretical physics and also read a fair bit of Latour later on. I don’t really like his work all that much, and wish he would be clearer sometimes, but the guy wasn’t an idiot, at least start from there.
In philosophy the usual advice when approaching someone’s work for the first time is to suspend critique on the first reading and just try and take them seriously and understand what they were doing on their own terms. Then you can go back and apply the critical razor later. It’s a useful tool to apply to other areas of life too.
I don't understand why you find this so objectionable.
If I grasp Latour's point, the settlement of a controversy fixes an understanding of nature at a particular point (the causal effect). It seems sensible then to forbid that understanding of nature to be used as an explanation for why the controversy was settled. Doing that would affix an absoluteness to the understanding that's unjustified, given the empirical approach. At some point in the future some new anomaly in the understanding (Nature) will be discovered, leading to a controversy, empirical science will resolve it, and a new understanding will be synthesized; handing us a representation. It's probably better than the earlier representation, but it's still not all of Nature.
I think Latour's view is a humble view.
"The basic trouble with much of Latour’s writings—as with those of some other sociologists and philosophers of a “social constructivist” bent—is that these texts are often ambiguous and can be read in at least two distinct ways: a “moderate” reading, which leads to claims that are either worth discussing or else true but trivial; and a “radical” reading, which leads to claims that are surprising but false. Unfortunately, the radical interpretation is often taken not only as the “correct” interpretation of the original text but also as a well-established fact"
From https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour....
It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...).
It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...
That stance is well-covered here.[1]
Some of the problems in science come from experiments too close to the noise threshold. This is most of social science and psychology. The hard-line position is Rutherford's "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Related to this is Hoyle's "Science is prediction, not explanation." For phenomena that led to useful engineering, repeatability and predictability are very good. Otherwise the products won't work.
People tend to forget this, because controversial research topics are often close to the noise threshold. It something turns out to be real, and you can get it to happen further from the threshold, it becomes routine engineering. It's then no longer controversial. Your result gets a few lines in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. This sort of science makes the world go.
Philip K. Dick's “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” remains useful.
Taking this hard-line position is useful, because humans are evolved and wired to see patterns near the noise threshold. This is a useful survival strategy for detecting predators in the brush, even with a high false-alarm rate. Once past survival level, it's less useful.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...
I like to think we humans are also part of nature, therefore our work, and our creations, cannot be so clearly separated from nature. In the same manner, the work of bees and ants can also be called artificial, in the sense that they practice a craft and manipulate the natural world around them. For me it's all on the same spectrum.
Now, who does that make you think of?
"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep", as some mustachioed German once properly described.
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
(You can tell he's a continental philosopher because this is five times as long as it should be due to every sentence being filled with synonyms.)
Of course, he also once said that Ramses II couldn't have died of tuberculosis because science hadn't invented the concept of "dying of tuberculosis" yet.