Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World (Key Sociologists)
Anders Blok
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0415642981
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
French sociologist and philosopher, Bruno Latour, is one of the most significant and creative thinkers of the last decades. Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World is the first comprehensive and accessible English-language introduction to this multi-faceted work. The book focuses on core Latourian themes:
• contribution to science studies (STS – Science, Technology & Society)
• philosophical approach to the rise and fall of modernity
• innovative thoughts on politics, nature, and ecology
• contribution to the branch of sociology known as ANT – Actor-Network Theory.
With ANT, Latour has pioneered an approach to socio-cultural analysis built on the notion that social life arises in complex networks of actants – people, things, ideas, norms, technologies, and so on – influencing each other in dynamic ways. This book explores how Latour helps us make sense of the changing interrelations of science, technology, society, nature, and politics beyond modernity.
which we believe represents particularly paradigmatic examples. Alfred N. Whitehead The first point of reference here is Whitehead and his cosmological-cumChristian “process philosophy,” which implies and develops a metaphysical concept of nature that reaches well beyond the traditional materialism of the natural sciences (see Van Der Veken 2000). In his later writings, Latour often refers to Whitehead when attempting to transgress the deeply rooted ontological–metaphysical dichotomies between
“hybrid forum” originates in the work of Latour’s colleague Michel Callon (Callon & Rip 1992). However, Latour often borrows the expression and uses it as largely synonymous to his own “parliament of things.” See, for instance, Kastrissianakis’ interview with Latour (2003). 13 The official title of these forums is “Commissions locales de l’eau”; i.e. local water commissions. 14 Whether or not such bureaucratic tendencies in environmental politics represent more than a “Western” phenomenon is a long
for algebraic function, a new heating system to keep specimens longer. History of science is the history of these innovations. (Latour 1990: 20) Latour thus rejects the notion that we would need to look further than such numerous tangible innovations to explain the dominant status of Western techno-science. Even so-called “theoretical” work – “abstractions” and “formalisms,” which many would regard as uniquely epistemological themes – is explained by Latour as a matter of practical combinations
one has ever heard of a collective that did not mobilize heaven and earth in its composition, along with bodies and souls, property and law, gods and ancestors, powers and beliefs, beasts and fictional beings . . . Such is the ancient anthropological matrix, the one we have never abandoned. (Latour 1993: 107) On this basis, Latour considers it a fundamental lack in absolute relativism that this position simply ignores nature. For the same reason, he disagrees with cultural relativism, which also
gaining access to a range of extra-subjective resources, such as prices, product standards, spreadsheets and accounting norms. These resources, and their proper combination, are what enable the framing (and localization) of action within a market.18 However, it would make little sense to say that such calculative 124 Sociology of associations actions are either local or global, micro or macro. Relations of scale and size – from micro to macro – should be seen as the emerging and transformable