Summer '08 Reading Group Notes
From Studyplace
Summer '08 Reading Group:
The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Bruno Latour
Contents |
Participants in our Collective
Humans
Frank Moretti, Annie Rudd, Aaron Hung, Eric Stromme, Davide Solomita, Cyrille Adam, Will Heublein, Jonah Bossewitch
Non-Humans
Latour's Text, Frank's Office (and table, and air-conditioner, and library), Plato's Cave, Columbia University, Teachers College, The Earth Institute, etc...
Favorite Quotes
What is to be done with Political Ecology? Nothing. What is to be done with Political Ecology? Political Ecology! p. 1
Science no longer kidnaps external reality to transform it into an appellate court of last resort, threatening public life with a promise of salvation worse than the evil against which it offers protection. p. 40
No Westerner today would take the word "man" to be unmarked. "Male/female," "man/woman," "he/she": these terms have slowly take hte place of what was formely self-evident. The two labels are both marked, coded, embodied. Neither can claim any longer to designate effortlessly and incontestably the universal on the basis of which the other remained an "other" eternally apart. Thanks to the work of feminists, we now have access to conceptual institutions that allow us to makr the difference not between man and woman but betwee, on the one hand, the former pair made up of man, an unmarked category ,and woman, a single marked category, and on the other hand the new and infintitely more problematic pair made up of the two equally marked categories of man and woman. We can forsee without difficulty that the same thing will very soon hold true for the categories of nature and culture... wipe out the ancient self-evidence with which it was taken a bit too hastily as if it were all there is. p. 49
Nonhumans deserve much better than to play indefinitely the rather unworthy, somewhat vulgar role of object on the great stage of nature. Gravity, for example: sublime gravity, an admirable rhizome that transformed Europe and all heavy bodies starting in 1650, deserves much better than to serve as an irrefutable objection to the social construtivist who is supposed to claim he can jump out of the proverbial fifteenth-story window without getting hurt because he believes - or so his adversaries believe - in relativism! When will we grow up and stop frightening ourselves with such bugaboos? When will we finally be able to secularize nonhumans by ceasing to objectify them? When will we be able not to reduce matters of concern to matters of fact? When will we be at last more faithful to the promises of empiricism? p. 51
The old Constitution thus finally resulted in the formation of two equally illicit assemblies: the first, brought together under the auspices of Science, was illegal, because it defined the common world without recourse to due process; the second was illegitimate by birth, since it lacked the reality of the things that had been given over to the other house and had to settle for "power relations," for multiplicity of irreconcilable viewpoints, for Mahiavellian cleverness alone. The first had reality but no politics. The second had politics and mere "social construction." Both had in reserve a quick shortcut that could bring discussion to an end: irrefutable reason, indisputable force, right and might, knowledge and power. p. 53-54
The non-humans had been kidnapped and turned into stones that could be thrown at the assembled demos. p. 54
I have no idea weather there is just one collective or whether ther are three, several, sixty-five, or an infinite number. I use the word only to mark a political philosophy in which there are no longer two major poles of attraction, one that would produce unity in the form of societies. The collective signifies "everything but not two separateed." p. 59
Formative Questions
- What sorts of metaphysics work smoothly with this epistemology? Elaborate on the metaphysical human wage - what wage is below this? What is the minimum entry fee?
- How can we imagine transposing this argument to journalism? economics? religion?
- In the critique of Science, who are the most negligent culprits in perpetuating the old constitution? Is it the scientists, of the larger institution of Science - the funders, the journalists, the administrative directors, and the corporations involved?
- Faith and the Collective: Does this argument implicate religious thinking (treating a certain set of propositions as unassailable authoritative) as bicameral and dichotomous? How can we bring faith back into democracy?
Note: Not sure for the origin of the question: Faith in reference to the collective, why not strive for the abolition of faith and substitute reason as a means of a more cohesive collective.
Response to note: Because reason might get you as far as the existence of the self, when you take into account sceptical hypotheses. Faith is an essential component of belief systems. Jonah
- Will we see the fully realized collective in our lifetime? What are the best approaches for teaching the importance of this approach? Tactics for defusing critics and opponents?
Clarification Questions
Are there standing questions, now that we have reached the conclusion of our discussion group?
Except where