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Philosophy of the Humanities 2, Notes and Summary of Week 2, Bruno Latour, Making things public
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Lecture notes and Summary of Week 2 materials- Bruno Latour, Making things public
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Bruno latour- Making things public Bruno latours first book „laboratory life” entails:
Facts are socially constructed
Objects/ideas/networks have agency
questions how scientists determine relevancy on what to examine and how
discovered facts are applied in the future
No fact out there waiting to be discovered but facts are still discovered by
scientists over time
„science in action“ is the book in which he develops ANT (Actor-Network-Theory)
Science and technology in the making vs ready-made science and technology
Everything is an actor network
An actor in ANT is an actant, a semiotic definition, something that acts or to
which activity is granted by another, an actant can be anything provided it is
granted to be the source of action
ANT is concerned to map the way actants interact among each other
ANT
Associations between heterogeneous actors
They describe how networks occur and understand why some are more
powerful than others
Technologies are a black box, they need to be reverse engineered to be
understood, the idea of its creation gives a hint what it entails
A engineer-sociologist applies heterogeneous engineering
Translation: general technical development over time
According to Latour, we have never been modern, in modernity they think in terms of
subject/object distinction, for him, no distinction should be made only collectives
considered
Objects need to have a seat on the parliament too
From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to make things public
He suggests an object-oriented democracy as solution
“what would an object-oriented democracy look like?”
Might be more connected by worries, matters of concern, issues we care for
than by other set of values, opinions, attitudes
Each object generates different pattern of emotion and disruptions,
disagreements, agreements
Each object triggers new occasions to differ and dispute but also new ways of
achieving closure without having to agree on much else than the object
Objects bind all of us in ways that map out a public space different from what
is usually recognized under label of “the political”
Body politics not only made of people
Combined with other things such as: clothes, sword, castles, cultivated fields,
crowns, cities, complex technology of gathering, cohabiting, reducing,
focusing etc. objects are everywhere
Good / bad gonvernment a good government is transparent
Latour tries to not distinct between subject/object within political decision making
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