Comments on: Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour

By: Klaus

Klaus — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:09:14 +0000

Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk at Harvard GSD (via Klaustoon): http://klaustoon.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/bruno-latour-and-peter-sloterdijk-ii/

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Everything is a Story || October || 2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:08:32 +0000

[...] Science is a story of how scientists go out and explore the world and find unchanging Platonic laws of Nature, which is an attractive but somewhat deceiving story. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Functionality || December || 2006

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 03:47:37 +0000

[...] But how do we determine the way things really are? We have no methods of discovering completely objective reality. Scientists use probes and interpret data, and Latour describes just how unobjective science really is. The idea of an Absolute Reality is a social construction. It’s attractive in a lot of ways – it’s simple, it’s easy to understand, and it’s what we’ve been taught. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Patterns and truth || December || 2006

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 02:41:23 +0000

[...] Is there such a thing as the Truth? I’m not sure there is. So much of what we observe is influenced by our previous experiences that I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a truly objective point of view. Books like Latour’s Politics of Nature and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action and Wilson’s Quantum Psychology describe the context-dependent nature of thought, and lectures like Hacking the Mind remind us how our brains can be fooled in all sorts of ways. I could throw around terms like “social construction of facts”, but the basic idea is that “truth” is a really tricky concept and depends a lot on what other people think. Truth evolves; the truth about the Earth went from being the center of the universe, to circling the sun, to being an insignificant mote. For there to be universal undisputed Truth, there would have to be an omniscient impartial observer to decide on what Truth is. God serves that purpose for a lot of people, I suppose, but since He is not available to me to communicate the Truth in any situation, I think it’s equivalent to there being no such observer. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour || July || 2006

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 23:11:49 +0000

[...] I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of science, but is sufficiently obscure that even after twenty years of refinement, there is still great confusion about what it actually means. So Latour wrote this book to be the definitive explanation of actor-network theory. And 260 pages later, I’m still not sure I can sum it up. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Evaluating quality of construction || June || 2006

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 03:15:14 +0000

[...] Thinking this way can lead one to start questioning everything. When writing an email, I sometimes start asking myself why I’m writing it, and what I hope the results will be. Heck, I even take it down to the level of paragraphs or sentences, sometimes asking myself what reason I have to include a sentence ((un)fortunately, the same criteria don’t seem to apply in my blog posts). When starting a conversation at work, it is often relevant for me to ask why; if I am blowing off steam and not able to frame any concrete initiatives, it is important for me to recognize that and decide whether it’s worth using up my social capital to blow off steam. If Latour is right, and everything is socially constructed, then I must be able to ask of everything whether it is well or badly constructed. [...]

By: The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich || Latour at Berkeley

The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich || Latour at Berkeley — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 05:59:17 +0000

[...] The movie was a walk through of his recent art show Making Things Public, which takes the ideas he covers in The Politics of Nature and explores artistic representations of them. I just did a quick pass through, and the exhibition website appears to do a good job of covering the exhibition ideas concisely, so go read that if you’re interested. [...]

By: The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich || Revisiting rereading || September || 2005

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 08:04:54 +0000

[...] One of the reasons that the Latour book made such an impression on me is that Latour had provided a four page summary at the back of the book of his overall argument (which came with a 15 page glossary to define the terms he was using). I actually read the summary first, and while I didn’t understand the details, it gave me the big picture of where he was going and how it was all going to fit together. Then when I read the book itself, it made a lot more sense to me because the structure was already in place in my brain, and I could just hang ideas off of it without wondering where they fit. [...]

By: The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich || Politics of Nature part 3 || May || 2005

Wed, 11 May 2005 00:33:28 +0000

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By: The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich || Politics of Nature part 2 || May || 2005

Tue, 10 May 2005 06:49:44 +0000

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