[HN Gopher] "Latour for Architects" is now open access
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"Latour for Architects" is now open access
Author : pella
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-10-29 09:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.taylorfrancis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.taylorfrancis.com)
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Can someone comment on the significance of this book?
| vvxujfihg wrote:
| Bruno Latour is a significant thinker on the sociology of
| technology. He died recently.
|
| This book is, according to him, "the best presentation of my
| entire work that I am aware of."
|
| The "Thinkers for Architects" book series is intended to
| introduce the work of important philosophers and other
| theorists to a relatively non-academic audience. As such, the
| books are of interest to readers from outside architecture
| (they are often very good).
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Thank you!
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Looks like it's free on Kindle for Prime members, which is
| handy.
| jacomyma wrote:
| Latour's work is broad and covers various disciplines:
| anthropology, sociology, philosophy... His books tend to be
| either broad and hard to read (An Inquiry on Modes of
| Existence) or easy but narrow (Pandora's Hope). Albena Yaneva's
| book is easy to read and broad. It covers Latour's work at
| large in simple terms, and not just for architects, in a way
| that Latour himself never took the time to write.
|
| Source: I worked with Latour for a few years.
| jacomyma wrote:
| While I am at it, let me paste below a Twitter thread I wrote
| about Latour when he passed. It may help understand his work
| from the angle of the HN culture.
|
| --- Bruno Latour has passed. We lost a true Wizard, larger
| than I can write.
|
| I had the pleasure to work with him at the Sciences Po
| medialab for a few years. I came as an engineer and left as
| an aspiring researcher.
|
| Here is what Latour's work has to offer to engineers and
| developers.
|
| It stems from this question: where is the work that makes the
| lasting things last?
|
| The most controversial of those lasting things is _truth_ ,
| but let me put that aside for a moment.
|
| Think instead of any piece of software one takes for granted.
| Wikipedia. Google. Photoshop. Firefox. VLC. None of those
| would last without amounts of work constantly fueled into
| them. Maintenance is something devs and engineer are
| painfully aware of.
|
| For me, adulthood came with the realization that everything
| is maintained, and therefore cannot be taken for granted.
| Things we depend on only last because work is put into making
| them last. And it may come to an end.
|
| It is uncomfortable to think of our conditions of existence
| as precarious, but it is also eye-opening, because it tells
| how we can change the situation.
|
| One can care for the world by maintaining certain things.
| That is why I and others put work into Gephi. We think it
| matters. Open science and open source software are entirely
| about that. We know that infrastructures can be precarious.
|
| If you maintain anything, you have a good idea of the work
| necessary to make it last. And as you also know, uninvolved
| people will always underestimate how much it takes. They
| don't need to see that work. The maintenance load is
| invisible.
|
| You can think of it the other way around. You also don't pay
| attention to the work put into maintaining everything else.
| Why would you? You may know it must exist, you have no reason
| to actually look for it. You can afford to forget about it.
|
| We all know the danger of taking our dependencies for
| granted. Let's not get delusional: our infrastructure does
| not last because it is robust. On the contrary, it gets
| called "robust" if enough work is put into making it last.
|
| The digital infrastructure is not robust like a brick. It is
| not inherently hard. It is robust like a tree: it lasts
| because it grows, adapts, and repairs. It may also die. We
| have to keep it alive. It demands care.
|
| Reading Latour is learning how to stop taking the lasting
| things for granted, and start looking into the work that
| makes them last, who does it, and why. It helps to inventory
| our dependencies, and to face the precariousness of our
| existence.
|
| One of his arguments is that this work does not only come
| from humans. For the tree, the work is done by a large
| network of interactions between other living beings like
| mushrooms, and the soil, the air, the Sun... It is always a
| network.
|
| If you've heard of actor-network theory (or ANT) it just
| means that actors are also networks and vice-versa. You can
| see the tree as a network of interactions. You would do that
| because that helps you to understand what makes the tree
| last.
|
| It works in sociology. Right now, the Ukrainians are hard at
| work maintaining Ukraine into existence. And not just them.
| We also care for Ukraine in may ways. We are small part of
| that network that makes it last.
|
| And it works for science. Even truth lasts because work is
| put into making it last. That claim has been controversial,
| but people like Trump have since made it clear that even
| truth can be under attack, and that we must care for it.
|
| That truth may not resist everything should be eye-opening.
| Nature does not resist everything either. That is what Latour
| calls "Gaia": the thin skin of living being at the surface of
| the Earth, that we must not take for granted, but care for.
|
| It's easier to understand if I present Latour as a wizard.
| The point in common between Magic and Latour's thinking is
| that our actions have distant consequences that one cannot
| see. Spells act, have consequences, yet how it works remains
| concealed.
|
| Latour shined at dispelling the belief that the things we
| take for granted last because it is in their nature. For ex.
| the Earth has to be kept inhabitable to humans. A network of
| beings used to do that for us, but we have disrupted and
| damaged it.
|
| Knowing that we are so bad at managing the distant
| consequences of our actions, like when it comes to buying
| meat or booking a plane, Latour spent his last years trying
| to cast a counterspell.
|
| He tried to interfere with the world so that more people get
| a better grasp of the maintenance work necessary to keep the
| Earth inhabitable to the humans over the long term. He tried
| to reconnect us with the distant consequences of our actions.
|
| I think that this should ring a bell to those who put work
| into infrastructures, digital or not. It certainly did with
| the engineer I was. If so, I recommend starting with his last
| major book, Facing Gaia. It's as good as an Alan Moore book.
| medo-bear wrote:
| how aware was Latour of Marxist influence on his work? most
| of what you described as ANT seems very reminiscent of
| whats called dialectical/historical materialism
| laurentoget wrote:
| Latour pretty explicitely thinks of himself as a post
| Marxist - one of his latest work was "la nouvelle classe
| ecologique" where he was making the point that
| environmental questions were the new Class Struggle and
| his work a continuation of Marxism in another context.
|
| Marxist intellectuals have been accusing him and his
| followers of using marxist tools while giving up on anti-
| capitalism
|
| https://www.babelio.com/livres/Latour-Memo-sur-la-
| nouvelle-c...
| medo-bear wrote:
| interesting. thanks for your reply
| zahma wrote:
| You explained Latour's ideas better than he was able to. I
| took a course of his on environmental politics a few years
| ago at Sciences Po. He had many interesting gems to share
| with us, but the narrative of the class was lost in the
| chaos of multiple speakers and unstated goals. Though it
| was frustrating to pick up on the thread that he knew
| linked so many topics together, I particularly enjoyed how
| he tried to drill down on what is "nature" and how we use
| the word "natural" to define so many things. Another one of
| his brilliant rhetorical questions was when we began to
| exploit nature for money, whether for gas or to charge
| people to enter parks. Of course we also touched on Gaia
| and Lovelock.
|
| For those who are interested in learning a bit more about
| his work, the NyT profiled him some years ago[1]. It was
| interesting because he had been assailed by the scientific
| community for undermining some of their assertions about
| scientific fact as some kind of a tangible truth to be
| held, but he seemed to have had a late-career change of
| heart.
|
| 1- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-
| latour-pos... (https://archive.ph/ULKzn)
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