[HN Gopher] A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
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A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
Author : Thevet
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-10-30 18:06 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jhiblog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jhiblog.org)
| ciconia wrote:
| > 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.
| sdbrown wrote:
| Wasn't this part of the base thesis of "We Have Never Been
| Modern"?
| smokel wrote:
| _> 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.
| currymj wrote:
| I think "undeformed travel" means that when people quote it or
| refer to it, they tend not to change his original words.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Yup, I agree. Shaping is commenting there about Latour being
| memorably aphoristic.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| 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.)
| bananamerica wrote:
| 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.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Honestly, the only thing I really remember from reading
| Deleuze was giving up on trying to get what "the Fold" was.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand
| (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright
| straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's
| actually really funny (the man loved puns).
|
| There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote
| incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's
| become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the
| (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
| bananamerica wrote:
| I actually read Derrida in my time with the literature
| department so there was no analytics vs continentals
| struggle going on at all.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Yes, Derrida is fine if you're just in it for wordplay.
| But it has always struck me that that's about all there
| is to it. I don't take him/deconstructionism seriously
| though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally
| escaped.
|
| I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine,
| not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| By the way, I'd make a similar criticism of, for example,
| later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind
| of solipsistic logorrhea. _Sein and Zeit_ and his
| lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical
| meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his
| views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some
| stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-
| hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards---but early
| Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in
| ways later Heidegger absolutely isn't).
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I agree with pretty much everything you written here. I
| think Wittgenstein (PI era) is the only convincing
| philosopher working in a similar "method" and for similar
| aims.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| Maybe it's precisely wordplay that is at stake here.
| Heidegger is no less stranger to it than Derrida. In fact
| a lot of his philosophical complexes are grounded
| explicitly into etymology and new ways to hear old words.
|
| Concerning Heidegger I stand in the opposite corner of
| the room: I liked his later writings more and despite
| having read him profusely, I'm not able to articulate his
| thoughts like you did by contrasting present-at-hand with
| ready-at-hand which however pinpoints very well the
| divide between analytical and continental thought.
|
| You're right to say that he "collapses into a kind of
| solipsistic logorrhea", and it is pertinent to what we
| are discussing since in heideggerian terms this should be
| expressed as "language bringing language to language
| through language".
|
| An example: the linguistic proximity between explicate vs
| implicate that is another instance of the ready-to-hand
| vs present-at-hand dichotomy.
| ttoinou wrote:
| I read two thirds of "Changer de societe, 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
| dmvdoug wrote:
| I feel like that's a fairly dense, technical point of entry
| for his work, since he's explicitly trying to set up an
| alternative theoretical framework for his brand of
| sociological/anthropological philosophy. Did you read _Lab
| Life_?
| ttoinou wrote:
| Nope ! It's not on my reading list
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Fair enough: so little time, so much to read.
|
| I was just wondering if you had found it to be tough
| sledding, if you had read it.
| ttoinou wrote:
| I have to admit, I have no idea how I came across this
| book from Latour, I guess I just liked the title. But the
| one you quoted looks interesting beyond just the title
| calf wrote:
| 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.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| 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
| Holderlin'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 Holderlin "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.
|
| Holderlin, 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...
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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.
| sdbrown wrote:
| 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.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Latour's "Aramis, or The Love of Technology" is one of my
| favorite books. It's the story, at many levels, of a personal
| transport system and more.
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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".
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Why should anyone care what a philosopher was _trying_ to do
| if he didn 't actually do it any sort of useful way? Stupid
| is as stupid does.
| maleno wrote:
| Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying
| to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful
| way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced--over
| time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique
| that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
| photonthug wrote:
| Because you risk missing something interesting or important
| because of your own arrogance, which is tragic, and most
| likely reinforcing that arrogance, which is even more
| tragic.
|
| As the parent mentions, engaging with primary sources from
| a different historical or cultural context with some
| patience and forbearance is particularly important for
| understanding philosophical works, but it's not that
| different for say mathematics or physics. Notation and
| terminology changes. With your attitude you'd probably
| assume archimedes, newton and Fibonacci were all stupid.
| calf wrote:
| 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.
| zamfi wrote:
| Huh. No one is forcing _you_ to do this. You are 100% free
| to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour--or any
| other philosopher's--writing.
|
| The point is only that it's _easy_ to dismiss most
| philosophy because it's easy to take a common reading,
| interpret words in ways the author may not have intended,
| and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness
| --but in contrast it's _hard_ to do the work to understand
| the context in which the author is writing, what the author
| is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to
| say through those words.
|
| It's fine to take the easy road here, it's just not going
| to teach you anything most of the time--and nor is it going
| to convince those who've done the hard part of anything.
| smokel wrote:
| At the time I'm writing this, there are three similar
| replies that use an argument along the lines of "you can
| simply ignore Latour if you don't like his work". I'm
| just replying to the first comment.
|
| Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many,
| people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of
| thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to
| ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near
| impossible.
|
| Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the
| connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory".
|
| Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual
| understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence"
| project, but apparently it is not that easy.
|
| It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms
| against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing
| it.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| eh, I mean, you do you -- nobody's forcing you to sit down
| and read French Philosophy or anything. But this is a
| thread on Bruno Latour, and context, intentions, and
| history are useful for having a productive discussion about
| the guy. Some of us do find context, intentions, and
| history for major thinkers or philosophical movements
| interesting -- that's what TFA was about, after all.
|
| Make no mistake, "intellectual garbage" does exist. I'm not
| saying everything is equally valid. Furthermore, life is
| short and you don't have to engage deeply with everything
| if it's not your cup of tea. But if you do want to engage
| in a debate about a major thinker with long career and a
| serious body of work (which by the way is not comparable to
| engaging with a random short HN post), then people are more
| likely to listen to you if you make an effort to understand
| them.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What is at stake for you here? Where does the resentment
| come from? Like.. people write books, some people read them
| and get something out of them, whether something critical
| or something positive. Reading things you don't agree with
| can help you understand youself and your commitments
| better. No one is trying to pull a fast one on you
| specifically by writing a book.
|
| Like great, you are scientific realist, we get it.
| Congratulations. That's all it needs to be.
|
| I just don't know how you can even live a peaceful life
| just getting angry that there is "bad" philosophy out
| there. Who cares? The line between "good" philosophy and
| "bad" is fraught and has been talked about since there's
| been philosophy (in the West). Hence the figure of the
| sophist for Plato being absolutely essential.
|
| Imagine Socrates with no Thrasymachus. Nietzsche without
| Hegel. Wittgenstein without Russell. "Bad" philosophy is
| always only a future gift to a good one. We should be giddy
| in our tear downs of other thinkers, not angry and bitter.
|
| It just really doesn't make any sense to be like this!
| codeulike wrote:
| Sokal on Latour:
|
| "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....
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think Latour's view is a humble view.
| _notreallyme_ wrote:
| 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...
| Animats 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.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-
| pos...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| > "Much of his writing resists analysis while encouraging
| repetition and undeformed travel. It is often hard to understand
| but easier to chant."
|
| Now, who does that make you think of?
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