About this Section
One of the characteristics of
Latour that I find so intriguing is that he is not afraid to express himself in
whatever way seems to him the most rhetorically appropriate. While Latour’s
books are often intellectually and philosophically “dense” at times, and while
he is certainly to be considered a “serious” academic and philosopher, Latour
is not afraid to step outside the confines of the traditional academic prose
style. He works are filled with vibrant metaphors, pithy one-liners, and
poignant aphorisms. His writing style is often very bold and forceful, and
sometimes, in my opinion, he’s just plain funny!
So, as I went through the readings
for this study, I underlined all the passages that really jumped out at me,
either because I thought they were crucial, or funny, or just well-written. I
essentially want three things to come of this section. First, it is my hope,
and my expectation, that reading these will be entertaining. Second, I would
like for anyone, whether an experienced Latour scholar or a novice reading
Latour for the first time, to contribute his/her own candidates for this
author’s greatest hits. It’s always interesting and beneficial for me to
see what passages leapt out at other people. When my professor and I talk
Latour, we never highlight the same lines, and I always get a lot out of seeing
what he thought was crucial. The third, and most important reason that I felt I
should create this section is that I hope that whoever reads it will see
connections (or threads, or something) that could only come out of reading the
quotes I’ve presented in the order I’ve presented them. Keep in mind, dear
reader, that I don’t have any preconceived notions about what these connections
will be. I have not ordered these quotes in any strategic manner whatsoever,
though I suppose to be fair, that I should confess that I deliberately selected
them randomly. Like I said in my introductory remarks on this blog, my hope for
this blog, and every section in it, is that it becomes a “factish”, an entity
all its own that I do not have full control over, even though I am (only in one
sense) the author of it. I don’t know what someone might see in these quotes.
But it seems to me that the experience of scanning a series of quotes by an
author would yield a different intellectual fruits than reading a book, or a
series of books, by that author. Without further ado, here are some of my
favorites…Oh! And one more thing before I forget. It is not my intention here,
as will become painfully obvious once you start reading, to explain what any of
these quotes mean. That’s part of the experiment that I want to conduct. What
new ontology might these words have once they are taken out of their original
surroundings and placed next to others? Can these words, or any words for that
matter, be considered factishes?
The Factishes
The only thing a
technological project cannot do is implement itself without placing itself in a
broader context. If it refuses to contextualize itself, it may remain
technologically perfect, but unreal. Technological projects that remain purely
technological are like moralists; their hands are clean, but they don’t have
hands.
Aramis, p. 127
If there is an
unworthy way to treat technologies, it lies in believing that they are means
toward ends.
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence,
p. 219
One should never speak of
“data”—what is given—but rather of sublata, that is, of
“achievements.”
Pandora’s Hope, p. 42
The factish can therefore
be defined as the wisdom of the passage;
as that which allows one to pass from fabrications to reality; as that which gives an autonomy we do not possess to beings that do not possess
it either, but that by this very token give it to us. The factish is a
fact-maker, a talk-maker. “Thanks to factishes,” as sorcerers, initiates,
researchers, artists, politicians might say, “we can produce slightly
autonomous beings that somewhat surpass us: divinities, facts, works,
representations.”
On
the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, p. 35
Like Zorro, the
technological being traces a fiery Z in a lightning stroke!...Technology, for
its part, seeks to be forgotten. Definitely, it is about technology rather than
nature that we can say “it likes to hide.”
AIME, p. 217
As always, ‘purity is the
vitriol of the soul’, the supreme temptation that must be resisted. But does
this mean we should keep everything?...Yes…If we have to revive the word once
more, that means reviving everything, saving everything, clarifying everything,
renewing everything, without abandoning a single sheep along the way; not a
single bit of piety will be lost, not one vapid remark, religious trinket, holy
souvenir, churchy knick-knack. I want to salvage all the treasures I was
promised as my inheritance, for it to be mine for keeps—and for me to be proud of it.
Rejoicing, p. 63
Reality is an object of
belief only for those who have started down this impossible cascade of
settlements, always tumbling into a worse and more radical solution. Let them
clean up their own mess and accept the responsibility for their own sins.
Pandora’s
Hope, p. 14
In order to exist, a being
must not only pass by way of
another [NET] (network) but also in another manner [PRE] (preposition), by
exploring other ways, as it were, of ALTERING itself.
AIME, p. 62
Neither religion nor
science is much interested in the visible: it is science that grasps the far
and distant; as to religion, it does not even try to grasp anything.
Factish Gods, p. 110
No one, in practice, has
ever displayed naïve belief in any being whatsoever…To take away the ontology
of belief, on the pretext that it occurs inside the subject, is to
misunderstand objects and human actors alike. It is to miss the wisdom of the
factishes.
Factish Gods, p. 42
The problem is that we
have been presented with a form of reason that is not reasonable enough and
above all not demanding enough, since it has always been divorced from the networks we have just identified, and since it
has only interrogated truth and error in a single key.
AIME, p. 66
Despite what is often said
of cold, smooth technology, in it there is never anything but breaks in
continuity; things never quite connect. And even if we forget technology and
let the thing created live its life, as soon as the thing in question needs to
be maintained, restored, revised, renewed, other ingenious approaches will be
required; we shall have to invoke the spirit of technology once again to
maintain it in being. There is nothing more “heteromatic” than a robot, an
automaton.
AIME, p. 222
If the traditional
picture had the motto “The more disconnected a science is the better,” science
studies says, “The more connected a science, the more accurate it may become.”
Pandora’s Hope, p. 97
…every elaboration
conveys at once the poison of the chain of logic and the counterpoison of its
revival.
Rejoicing, p. 112
Without beginning to
rework part of the philosophy of technology and part of the myth of progress,
we won’t be able to shake off the moral and political burden that the modernist
settlement has so unfairly placed on the shoulders of nonhumans. Nonhumans are
born free, and everywhere they are in chains.
Pandora’s Hope, p. 172
“Not enough negotiation!”
“No, no, not enough love!
Love and research—it’s the same movement.”
Aramis, p. 288
Transport of information,
without deformation, is not one of religious talk’s conditions of felicity.
When the Virgin hears the angel Gabriel’s salutation, she is no utterly
transformed that she becomes pregnant with the Savior, rendered, through her
agency, present again to the world. Surely this is not a case of double-click
communication! Yet, asking who Mary was, checking whether or not she was really
a Virgin, imagining a pathway to impregnate her with spermatic rays, deciding
whether Gabriel is male or female, are double-click questions…These questions
are not impious, nor even irrational: they are simply a category mistake.
Factish Gods, p. 107
Each mode can be wrong
about all the others, and no single one can serve definitively as an
unchallengeable standard for all the others.
AIME, p. 260
We live in collectives,
not in societies.
Pandora’s Hope, p. 193
…the former socialist
societies think they can solve both their problems by imitating the West; the
West thinks it has escaped both problems and believes it has lessons for others
even as it leaves the Earth and its people to die. The West thinks that it is
the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning
indefinitely, whereas it as perhaps already lost everything.
We Have Never Been Modern, p. 9
What good to you is
amassing fortunes of faithfulness, if you can’t take a penny of it with you
into the present time in which you have to love and speak?
Rejoicing, p. 142
The start depends on the
sequel. The father depends on the son. This reversal of the usual figures of
time is something the lovers fully feel, since they can say without lying that
the love that moves them now as though it had always existed is infinitely
stronger, deeper and more solid, and that it brings them closer together than
when they started out. To such a point that it gives them the amazing feeling
that it is finally only now, for the first time,
that they understand what has happened to them always. Yes, as you know very well, ‘it’s always the first
time’—otherwise you don’t love each other anymore.
Rejoicing, p. 48
…continuity is always the
effect of a leap across discontinuities; immanence is always obtained by a
paving of minuscule transcendences.
AIME, p. 267
This regime of utterance
[the religious kind]…is not complicated: it is simply fragile.
Rejoicing, p. 121
I want to substitute
another opposition between the long and mediated referential chains of science—that
lead to the distant and the absent—and the search for the representation of the
close and the present in religion.
Factish Gods, 113
…the very notion of
culture is an artefact created by Nature off.
WHNBM, p. 104
…sentences that
transmit love...judged, not by their content—their number of bytes—but by their
performative abilities. These are mainly evaluated only by this question: do
they produce the thing they talk about, namely lovers?...In love’s injunction,
attention is redirected not to the content of the message, but to the container
itself, the person-making.
Factish Gods, p. 102
There are many good
political reasons to believe in the difference between reason and politics.
Factish Gods, p. 45
The people whose job it is
to change the words so as to keep the meaning, clerics, have preferred piously
to preserve the words at the risk of losing the meaning; they’ve left us, the
rest of us, we latecomers, ignoramuses, stutterers, equipped with words that
have become untruthful for the purposes of recording the real things we hold
dear to our hearts.
Rejoicing, p. 8
We have never moved
forward or backward. We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to
different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times,
not the times that makes the sorting.
WHNBM, p. 76; original emphasis
Time is not what counts.
Time is what is counted.
Aramis, p. 88
The world has ‘lost
faith’, as they say? No, ‘Faith’ has lost the world.
Rejoicing, p. 12
It is hardly surprising
that philosophers have been unable to reach an understanding on the question of
realism and relativism: they have taken the two provisional extremities for the
entire chain, as if they had tried to understand how a lamp and a switch could
“correspond” to each other after cutting the wire and making the lamp “gaze
out” at the “external” switch.
Pandora’s Hope, p. 73
Postmodernism, as the name
indicates, is descended from the series of settlements that have defined
modernity. It has inherited from these the disconnected mind-in-the-vat’s quest
for absolute truth, the debate between Might and Right, the radical distinction
between science and politics, Kant’s constructivism, and the critical urge that
goes with it, but it has stopped believing it is possible to carry out this
implausible program successfully.
Pandora’s Hope, p. 21
…postmodernism is a
symptom, not a solution.
WHNBM, p. 74
…we decided to grant
historicity to the microorganisms, not only to the humans discovering them. This
entails that we should be able say that not only the microbes-for-us-humans
changed in the 1850s, but also the microbes-for-themselves. Their encounter
with Pasteur changed them as well. Pasteur, so to speak, “happened” to them.
Pandora’s Hope, p. 146
There is no truthfulness
without meticulous sorting.
Rejoicing, p. 8
But what are you waiting
for, then? If it’s a message, upload it! Religion—how many bits? Not a single
one. Not even a single pair of nought and one. This is because it offers
something better than information transfers: it transforms the absent into the
present, the dead into the risen.
Rejoicing, p. 123
“Do you love me?” is not
assessed by the originality of the sentence—none are more banal, trivial,
boring, rehashed—but by the transformation it generates in the listener, as
well as in the speaker. In-formation talk is one thing; trans-formation talk is
another.
Factish Gods, p. 102
Either the networks my
colleagues in science studies and I have traced do not really exist, and the
critics are quite right to marginalize them or segment them into three distinct
sets: facts, power, and discourse; or the networks are as we have described them,
and they do cross the borders of the great fiefdoms of criticism: they are
neither objective nor social, nor are they effects of discourse, even though
they are real, and collective, and discursive.
WHNBM, p. 6
Love is made of syllogisms whose premises are persons.
Factish Gods, p. 103
Love is made of syllogisms whose premises are persons.
Factish Gods, p. 103
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