(1): Latourology and the “Dark” Latour
“Bruno Latour’s anti-platonism can be seen in a recent interview, where he declares:
When I talk to people, students, or colleagues, I ask myself: have they passed the test of going through the STS field or not? If not, I have little to say to them because it means that Science, capital S will remain in the background unexamined, floating mysteriously above them.”
“Reminiscent of Plato’s famous “Let noone ignorant of geometry enter (here)”, supposedly engraved at the door of his Academy, Latour seems to be saying “Let noone ignorant of STS enter (the discussion)”.”
“just like “Science”, “STS” itself cannot be taken abstractly as an unexamined, free-floating, unitary discipline”
“we have to take both “Science” and “STS” as conceptual characters, as actants figuring in Latour’s inner multiplicities and outer networks.”
“Thus Latour can treat Peter Sloterdijk’s “Spherology” as an alternative portal for entering the discussion and participating in the “imaginary community” of the “post-natural” (but not post-real) and “post-epistemological” (but not post-truth) episteme that has already begun.”
“Latour rejects the choice between a free-floating universality and a narrow local identity. His third way, neither universality nor identity, is commonality: a common language and a “common ground” that is also a frightening “common loss of ground”.”
“This common loss of ground constitutes a different type of universality, that is no longer the luminous “universality of humanity” of the Enlightenment but a darker “tragic form of universality”:
It is our turn to be threatened, our turn to realize we will disappear, and we are now in exactly the same non-epistemological situation where our former “objects” of study had found themselves when they encountered the White Man… We are also the ones at stake.”
“The non-epistemological encounter with “Gaia” opens an age of fright (and no longer an age of anxiety) and of the threat of extinction.”
“We are now all in the dark and we need to find new principles of orientation:
we need to orient ourselves in the dark. Instead of the urgency of seeing data disappear and recording them before it is too late, it is the urgency of saving all the storytellers! That’s a pretty good reason to become much more attentive to the diversity of ways others have to encounter you; that’s when we will also do anything to find diversity in our own tradition. That’s when philosophy and anthropology are cooperating best.”
“Attention, diversity, encounter, and cooperation are some of the orienting values of Latour’s tragic commonality.”