The Difference Between a Description and an Explanation: Deficits in Latour

Ether Wave Propaganda as up a nice video of Schaffer on Latour, but the commentary on the question of agency is even more interesting. As EWP points out, the difference between Schaffer and Latour is programmatic, and as such it falls to the difference between description and explanation. In short, Latour is not attempting to explain things. [...]

Bourdieu on Blogging: Where to Find Symbolic Capital?

Living Beyond Your Means, On Credit I don’t have time to summarize in depth, but some may be interested in this discussion over at the Latourian blog We Have Never Been Blogging: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. In our back and forth I quote from Bourdieu, from his Homo Academicus, a passage meant to describe the [...]

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour: Updated

Adriano has a really articulate comment he put up under my posting on Latour’s implicit Fascism, Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency. I have to comment on this later, but his essential Bourdieu vs. Latour political point is certainly a compelling one. Its has a double-edged blade when put to Harman and Levi [...]

Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency

–– I’m still reading and digesting the essay, but Steve Fuller’s critical treatment of Latour, with its deep investigation into the economic and political matrix out of which it came is extremely interesting reading, in particular for those that imagine that there is something inherently liberating by either Flat Ontologies, or the raising of objects [...]

Birth of Sandman: the Pulverization of Material, the Inversion of Man

Recently I read in connection to Latour that there has been a pulverization of the material, somehow, and that this somehow points us towards a world of objects. It calls to mind for me that for Spinoza the world itself too is pulverized, or must be pulverized unto a microstate, so as to become fully active [...]

The Copiousness of Copies

[click on diagram for larger version] [Bruno Latour makes this citation correction for the article discussed below: the paper and the theory is Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe and here is the exact reference to the soon to be published version: « The Migration of the Aura - Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles », [...]

Latour’s Inconsistency, “Start in the Middle”

Ailsa, over at a musing space asks a question that I have been troubled by myself, as she that she is in a kind of Möbius strip if she takes Latour’s reduction of Pasteur’s actorly position in a network, and applies it to Latour himself. If I understand her correctly, she is a counselor interested in the consequences [...]

Comments upon Latour’s Flat Originality and Immanence

Ailsa, over at a musing space; a performance in progress comments upon my recent thoughts on Latour’s concept of Originality, The Flatness of Latour’s Concept of Origin and Holbein’s The Ambassadors. In “it’s not a case of “either or” but of ”and, and” she finds that I haven’t fully satisfied on my my claim that Latour’s treatment of [...]

The Flatness of Latour’s Concept of Origin and Holbein’s The Ambassadors

[Bruno Latour offers this citation correction for the article discussed below: the paper and the theory is Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe and here is the exact reference to the soon to be published version: « The Migration of the Aura - Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles », a chapter prepared for Thomas Bartscherer [...]

The Facsimile and the Stolen Aura of the Original

The Latourian Migration [Bruno Latour offers this citation correction for the article discussed below: Latour and Adam Lowe and here is the exact reference to the soon to be published version: « The Migration of the Aura - Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles », a chapter prepared for Thomas Bartscherer (editor) Switching Codes, University [...]