Episode #169 -Transcript
So the guy we’re talking about today is Bruno Latour. A Philosopher, a Sociologist, an Anthropologist…a man who in the year 1993 releases a book that GETS the philosophical world a talkin’...a book that SOME people believe, SOLVES, one of the most important, heated debates in recent epistemology…the TITLE of the book was… We Have Never Been Modern.
Now, to understand what he means when he says We Have Never Been Modern…let’s talk about modern for second. We’ve talked about it on this podcast… for years, ever since we did our first episodes on Kant, maybe even BEFORE that.
What does it MEAN to BE a modern person?
You know, you can use the word “modern” to describe something in normal, everyday conversation… and it more or less just means that something was RECENT. It happened close to when we are living right now. But in the philosophical context of what we’re talking about here today…when talking about human subjectivity…the word MODERN is going to describe an attitude of thinking, or even a WAY OF BEING… that emerged hundreds of years ago near the beginning of the Enlightenment. So, with that in mind…the question we REALLY are asking here is not what does it mean to be a modern person…but what does it mean to THINK like a person who is a product of modernity?
You can imagine people living during the middle ages. The people of this time thought about things very DIFFERENTLY than people do today. They thought differently…because nearly every cultural input they received from the cradle to the grave was, different. Just as an EXAMPLE of this…historian Marc Bloch famously talks about feudal society as being a place where it was practically impossible to be an atheist. NOT that the laws of physics PRECLUDED anyone from ever HOLDING that idea in their brain…but that given the fact… that almost every way that people were taught to view themselves had to do with their relationship to God and God’s decrees for conduct on this earth…EFFECTIVELY…it was just IMPOSSIBLE for the average person to come out of an average upbringing thinking of themselves as an atheist.
Well smash cut to modernity…and we have Nietzsche fearing almost the exact OPPOSITE of that. HE’S fearing the world is becoming a place where it becomes almost impossible for a thinking person to see themselves as an instantiation of God. And this is just ONE example of what we’re talking about here today. JUST AS the premises of the middle ages dictated a LOT of the premises people use to make sense of the world around them…there are premises that underlie MODERNITY that dictate our thought as well.
You can SPOT them if you look for them. In fact, for Bruno Latour…the fact we’re EVEN ABLE TO SPOT THEM… is EXCITING EVIDENCE of the fact…that we have actually been moving into a DIFFERENT era of history…but MORE on that later. We ALL still have REMNANTS of modernity that help us make sense of things around us. And I thought it’d be fun here today to play a little game. It’s a game I like to call on a scale of 1-10 how modern is your thinking. Alternative title I’ve been working with: is on a scale of one to Jordan Peterson how badly do YOU need to rescue your father from the belly of the whale. Actually he’s more pre-modern. But COME ON it’s funny.
Anyway HERE’S how the game works: give yourself a point if you answer yes to any of the following statements:
Do you believe that science is the best way of arriving at knowledge about the world around you? Give yourself a point.
Do you believe that science…and politics…should be two completely distinct, purified realms of study.
Scientists should study the objective world of nature, the world of objects. And that Politics should deal with the subjective world of human culture, people making deals and arrangements, the world of subjects. Do you believe that these two things belong in their own separate realms of expertise…give yourself a point if the answer is yes.
Give yourself ANOTHER point… if you do NOT believe in a literal, supernatural god that has commands that we should be building our societies around.
More than that…give yourself a point… if you think we’re living in a fundamentally NEW kind of society in modernity…one that’s DISTINCT… from those PRE-modern societies…where the people PROJECTED their HUMANITY ONTO the natural world around them…they didn’t HAVE unbiased scientists channeling nature bringing this level of progress.
Give yourself ANOTHER point… if you believe in the idea that progress, is linear… and I guess another point if you believe that modernity is the path to that progress. That the more experiments we run…the more science and technology progresses… the more WE progress as a species.
That since the beginning of the Enlightenment…we’ve solved most of the BIG problems humanity has faced throughout history, look at medicine, look at advanced agriculture…all we got left are a bunch of complex, nuanced problems to deal with and that’s IN PART…a TESTAMENT… to how far we’ve PROGRESSED. We are CLEARLY on the right track here!
Now I could obviously keep going but I think you all get the point. You score more than four points on this list and congratulations…you are a PRODUCT of modern thought. Nothing wrong with that. But I THINK Latour would say that if you find yourself SO EMBEDDED in these beliefs that they seem practically self-evident to you where you have a hard time even imagining any other way reality could be…maybe try to be self aware of that fact and do some digging. Just to be clear: the problem here is NOT with using the premises of modernity to make sense of the world…the problem…just like it was with the people of the middle ages…the problem is having too much FAITH in the premises of modernity.
Because the reality is that they haven’t exactly produced the world they promised to produce if we just bowed our heads had faith and ate the jesus cracker. Modernity has seemingly led to some of the greatest disasters in human history and WE GOTTA be willing to TAKE our subjectivity to task if we want to remain intellectually honest. This is what philosophers have been doing for almost 150 years trying to figure out what went wrong and how we should be moving forward.
So just to keep the tempo right here we have modernity, Latour sometimes calls this the modern constitution. We have the problems CREATED by modernity and the modern constitution. And then we have the REACTIONS to the problems of modernity trying to find a way to move forward.
And in this group there’s a couple of big ones that Bruno Latour is going to reference a lot. We have on one hand the Post-modernist reaction to modernity…done tons of episodes on them but loosely classified the idea is that we need to get BEYOND the mistakes of modernity. And on the other side you got Scientific Realists that think that yes, we’ve made mistakes… but that what we NEED to do is FIX the mistakes and stick to scientific observation as the way to arrive at objective knowledge about the world.
Now, these two groups fighting with each other… has become a mainstay of our age. Like the moss that grows on the north side of the tree. Like Grandma fighting with the neighbors. In fact at ONE point…the Postmodernists and Scientific Realists ACTUALLY…went to WAR with each other. It’s been called the SCIENCE WARS of the 1990’s.
The BATTLEFIELD was epistemology…how do we know what we know.
And BOTH SIDES came to the battlefield with some pretty heavy artillery as to why the OTHER side was full of COMPLETE… MORONS.
Doubt it and you can SEE this war playing still itself out in comment sections ALL ACROSS the internet. Postmodernist… believing that knowledge is a social construction… may look at a Scientific Realist posting a comment and characterize them as a complete idiot! That they’re essentially… like a religious zealot on behalf of science. Understanding REALITY to them JUST MEANS to understand how a bunch of atoms and molecules relate to each other. That what…you don’t realize how EVERYTHING down to the language you use…the concepts you’re studying…human reality is MORE than just a bunch of atoms…you don’t realize how much HUMANITY you’re projecting onto the natural world? You’re NO DIFFERENT than your supposedly primitive ancestors a postmodernist might say! You TELL them this and they’ll say oh, just run MORE experiments and THEN we’ll eventually get to the OBJECTIVE TRUTH about the universe TRUST ME…you’d UNDERSTAND the WEAKNESSES in my doctrine if ONLY you were a scientist like me! SOUNDS PRETTY RELIGIOUS to the postmodernist.
But then on the other hand a Scientific Realist on one of these comment sections might see a postmodernist and think that THEY’RE an idiot as well. KNOWLEDGE is ENTIRELY…a social construction? Like what…ALL of these different ways of socially constructing reality are equally valid? We can’t have ANY REASONABLE WAY of determining how ONE way of understanding reality is better than another? And what…scientists…when they conduct scientific experiments aren’t accessing ANYTHING at ALL that exists OBJECTIVELY in the universe? CLEARLY scientists are in contact with SOMETHING enduring that’s out there, to deny that is just to border on insanity.
And you can spend your LIFE battling in these comment sections poised on one side or the other of this oversimplified debate. Like an Atheist that spends their entire life arguing against people that believe in God because it's a debate they KNOW they can win, they’re ADDICTED to it, they just LOVE that feeling of winning…you can waste the SAME amount of time entrenched in this epistemological battle against a cartoon of a postmodernist or a scientific realist. Again, no matter how much more RIGHT you are than other people around you…you HAVE to be willing to take your understanding of the world to task or you’re just going to stay in the same place for the rest of your life.
These two groups keep on arguing with each other…and TO their credit, it’s certainly NOT FOR LACK OF EFFORT. There’s been a LOT OF WORK DONE in the field of epistemology trying to find some sort of connection between the two. How can we bring the BEST of both worlds together? Why does it have to be one or the other? COUNTLESS books have been written…. and yet they still continue to argue…and Bruno Latour would probably want to pop in at this point and say that hey…by the way… if you’re EVER expecting these two sides to come to any sort of a ceasefire in this WAR that’s going on…you may be waiting AROUND for a while.
Because NOT ONLY are both sides COMPLETELY off the reservation not UNLIKE grandma yelling at the neighbors everyday…but more importantly…they’re looking for the SOLUTION to their disagreement… in entirely the wrong place.
Which by the way…just a general lesson here we can take about LIFE from the work of Bruno Latour is that…whenever there is a big problem that people around you are trying to solve…and they’ve been trying to solve it forever and can’t seem to arrive at any solutions…try looking NOT to where everyone seems to be DISAGREEING. Try looking to where everyone agrees.
Because sure, it would stand to reason on the surface… that a problem in epistemology is going to HAVE an epistemological solution. But Bruno Latour thinks the REAL problem between the post-modernists and the scientific realists…is a METAPHYSICAL problem. They both AGREE… on a metaphysical premise that we’ve put WAY TOO MUCH FAITH in since the dawn of the Enlightenment.
And we can see it in a lot of places: Kant’s Copernican Revolution…an early disagreement between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle about whether TRUTH, should have to pass through the laboratory or whether it can be arrived at collectively by culture…it’s a metaphysical premise we’re PROUD of that runs DEEP into the heart of the modern attitude, what I’m talking about is: the assumed separation… between human and non-human entities.
Put another way…the way this distinction manifests in the SCIENCES is that this the purification, as Latour says, of the world of objects which are to be studied by scientists, nature, and the world of subjects which are to be studied by politics, culture. Written into the CONSTITUTION of modernity is the tacit agreement…that the BEST way that we’re going to arrive at a progressively nuanced understanding of the world around us…is by SEPARATING nature and culture. Politics shouldn’t be brought into the sciences. Culture is a realm all its own to be studied. That is the best way to progress is by PURIFYING these respective fields. This is a HALLMARK of modern thought. This is something MOST people just take for granted…and this is the METAPHYSICAL agreement…. that the postmodernist and the scientific realist NEED… in order to be at odds with each other, specialists on either SIDE of this polarity of nature and culture.
But what if that polarity didn’t actually exist? What if the modern separation between nature and culture never ACTUALLY happened? What if instead it has been an illusion. An illusion that has allowed us to intellectually justify a faulty way of conducting science, an incomplete method of analyzing culture and has led to a structure to society that is DESTROYING the world as we know it?
Well in that world then the postmodernist and the scientist would quickly realize that they have very little to ARGUE about…because all of a sudden they’re on the same team…all of a sudden there’d be no reason to assume that we need to keep culture completely separate from nature and vice versa. In that world…to Bruno Latour it’s NOT that we need to get BEYOND our modern constitution in any post-modern sense…or that we need to PRESERVE our modern constitution in the scientific realist sense. Neither of these is solving any problems with being modern…because when you look at the reality of the world to Latour: We have never BEEN modern.
When a postmodernist and a scientific realist argue in the comment section, about knowledge…they’re really just a bunch of confused people, ENTRENCHED in the modern attitude, arguing about how to find some sort of peaceful common ground on the battlefield of being completely…metaphysically… wrong. And if the modern constitution is broken. Maybe it’s time for us to have a constitutional convention.
But wait, wait, wait hold on a second. For me. Let me just try to wrap my head around this. So the whole way that we break things up, human vs nonhuman as Latour is saying…in the sciences…it’ll be culture on the human side, nature on the non-human side, right…this whole, DUALISTIC way of breaking things up, ALL of that has been wrong from the start?
Well, what’s gonna happen there? What happens when you shift something THAT fundamental in this jenga tower we’ve been trying to keep up over the years…what does that change about the way we see the world? Can be hard to even envision what that would look like in practice.
Well we’d HAVE to start… by trying to look at everything in terms of it being on an equal metaphysical footing. Pretend nature and culture don’t even exist as categories for a second. Human and nonhuman…NOT EVEN A THING. Pretend that ALL THERE IS out there…are just entities. Or Actants as Latour is going to call them. Now pretend these actants…are all metaphysically equivalent to each other…and that NONE of these entities can be reduced to any other entity or explanation. This could be a rock, a tree, this could be a person…but it could also be an idea, a word, a political party, a bank account, an image…ALL of these are examples of ACTANTS. Now picture the world when viewing ALL of these through a lens where they are metaphysically equal. Not subjects. Not objects. Not nature. Not culture. Just actants… that join together to form what Latour calls collectives…collectives of actants that through their connections to OTHER actants…gain force in the world.
The process of understanding the world then…THROUGH THIS WORLDVIEW…requires among other things for us to study where these actants go, how they combine together, when collectives break apart, how collectives emerge out of earlier collectives…this forms the basis of what Latour will later call his Actor Network Theory.
Now one interesting thing to note here is that when you start to remove PIECES of that modern constitution like this purification of nature and culture…OTHER pieces of the modern attitude start to unravel as well. For example take the idea of linear progress…the idea that the more experiments we run, the more we advance through technology so that we can HARNESS nature around us to our benefit the closer and closer we’ll get to some ULTIMATE goal of colonizing the galaxy…you know…the same sort of modern thinking that led to parts of Europe COLONIZING the globe during the age of exploration. Under this actor network theory…there’s less of a definitive END GOAL or END OF HISTORY that’s being AIMED for…you’re more or less just studying actants and how they relate to each other and change. Just interesting to consider different looks at the world once you get a bit outside of the modern attitude we were all born into.
Something ELSE interesting to consider is that when viewing the world through a non-dualistic lens…something weird starts to happen. The fact that we can move around and talk and manipulate the environment really starts to matter LESS under this worldview. And what you start to realize is that even things that CAN’T move around and DON’T have a human voice…can have very real impacts on everything that is possible for us on the HUMAN side of things.
Tons of examples of this, you wanna build something but there’s a giant BOULDER in your way. You want to change things politically…or maybe you don’t have the MONEY to influence politics or there’s LAWS against speaking out. You want to go outside and see your friends but there is a virus going around and you need to stay inside. Point is: human and non-human…are intrinsically connected. You can see it, the instant you change that modern assumption that I’m a human… I’m one thing…and out there, well that’s nature…that’s the supply cabinet…that’s the place we gather stuff to do our bidding as human beings. Now, more on that in second…but no doubt… there’s gotta be some people out there with some concerns about treating everything on an equal metaphysical footing. Let’s address some of those concerns because they certainly are legitimate.
It’s like I hear ya…I hear ya Latour on this new potential way of viewing things metaphysically…but why…before I ask WHY I would ever want to do something like that…HOW would I ever do something like that? Like what do you want me to do…walk around, viewing people as entities instead of people? Seeing things in terms of their relationships to other things? What am I a robot mark zuckerberg? And here’s ANOTHER amazing thing I’m really excited to tell you about! Correction: just mark zuckerberg. What am I him? This is INHUMAN Latour.
And he’d probably say back look just calm down for a second. It’s not…that…weird. Bruno Latour makes the point that it’s really not THAT FOREIGN of a concept if you think about it…it’s not like if you remove the human nonhuman distinction you’re all of a sudden living on an alien planet. We already DO see the world in terms of what he calls HYBRIDS, all the time. To illustrate what a HYBRID is…he uses the example of the newspaper… but keep in mind… this same thing applies to news stories no matter WHERE you get your news.
He starts out just sitting around his house describing his experience of reading the morning paper. Oh, well on page four we got a story on the OZONE Layer today. Hmm. Things ARE NOT good apparently in the early 1990’s when it comes to the OZONE layer. They talk in the article about aerosol measurements. Then they go from chemistry to talking about the CEO of Monsanto being charged for crimes against the ecosphere. Few paragraphs later it’s about heads of state that are getting involved. Then it’s about meteorologists and why they don’t AGREE with the chemists. Later on they’re talking about moratoriums and third world countries and all the rest of it. Now…
This is a normal NEWSPAPER article he says. We read these sorts of things every single day. But consider for a second what you’re actually READING when you READ one of these articles. He says:
“The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics… then later on… The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors - none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.”
Then he just goes off and starts listing news stories in the rest of the paper…goes through page by page and lists all the stories he’s going to be reading about that day. Page six there’s a story about AIDS. Page eight a story about computer chips controlled by the Japanese. On page twelve he says “the pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive." An article about birth control and global religious groups.
Now here’s what he’s getting at: IF we were to look at each element of this story individually…which is to say if we were to look at each thing under the premises of the enlightenment where there is a PURIFICATION between the SCIENTIFIC issues and the POLITICAL issues…each one of these things would require a different expert from a different field to be able to weigh in on them. The fallopian tubes might need a biologist to weigh in. The bishops may require a theologian. The contraceptive may require a doctor.
But that’s not how we ACTUALLY experience reality. We NEVER have. In practice we READ about these highly complex issues all quilted together into these “hybrid articles” as he calls them…and none of this is CONFUSING to us. In fact, it’s something you’re so USED to doing you do it everyday in between getting dressed and having a bowl of captain crunch. We don’t deal with isolated scientific data…or isolated cultural analysis. The two are ALWAYS blended together into these “hybrids” as he calls them. Hybrids of nature and culture.
There is no real separation between science and politics…or economy or law or religion or technology for that matter…and by the way…that’s a GOOD THING.
Latour gives an example at one point: when you try to separate nature and culture in an attempt to try to understand the world better, like if THAT’s your strategy…that’s like trying to understand WAR by getting a bunch of people and a bunch of weapons putting them in a room…and putting all of the people on one side of the room…and all of the weapons on the other side of the room. No, that’s not going to work. Understanding human society IS understanding the relationship between human and non-human beings.
Imagine talking about the ozone layer PURELY from the perspective of ECOLOGY he says. You can’t DO it. The very CONCEPT of the ozone layer that we’re studying is a collective of both cultural AND natural entities. There’s a sense in which ignoring the cultural significance of the OZONE layer, looking at it ONLY through scientific terms… would be missing out on a HUGE PIECE of what the ozone layer even is. Why we’re even STUDYING it.
So we ALREADY DO THIS all the time…we already see the world in terms of these blended hybrids so …to the person from before who’s worried they’re gonna start seeing leprechauns or something if they switch up the modern constitution. Don’t worry about it.
And if I remember correctly from before that person was first going to ask HOW we can see the world in a new way…and THEN was going to ask WHY they should be doing this at all. That’s ALSO a fair QUESTION! I mean, generally speaking: why fix something that’s working? Why fix the human non-human distinction…it SEEMS to have gotten us a LOT OF STUFF over the years…we have planes and cars and vaccines and all the rest of the science and technology that has made our lives indistinguishable from the pre-modern societies of the past.
And I think Latour would want to ask a follow up question about the degree to which the modern attitude is working… and for who exactly it IS working. And I THINK he’d want to draw your attention to what may go down in history as a revolutionary year for human subjectivity…the year is 1989.
You know, you can imagine people living during the middle ages again…and as we talked about before they had a totally different set of presuppositions they were building their reality from. And it’s NOT like they were being FORCED what to think…but the WAY they thought, definitely allowed them to be more receptive to certain ideas, more charitable to certain questions, more likely to THINK in a particular direction.
We HAVE to suspect…that that SAME situation applies for our MODERN attitude as well and the year 1989, really served as a slap in the face to that reality for Latour.
1989 is the beginning of the collapse of the soviet union. Fall of the Berlin Wall. Latour says this was a year of TRIUMPH for the west…the victory of liberalism, of capitalism, of Western democracy. Everyone is celebrating.
But the triumph is short lived he says…this moment in history…becomes the first time in a WHILE western culture can STOP worrying about some global political crisis…take a step back…take an INVENTORY of the problems we NOW have to solve…and wow. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM essentially…has to do with humanity and its relationship to the planet. Pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, climate change, resource management, pandemics, the list goes on and Latour says it is NO coincidence. This is part and parcel of the modern attitude. This is what happens when nature and culture are FALSELY seen as being two purified domains that operate independently. This is the attitude that we STRUCTURED our societies around…and when 1989 hits, people start to think man…have we COMPLETELY messed this up? What do we gotta change about our thinking? Latour writes about it beautifully here he says:
“After seeing the best intentions go doubly awry, we moderns from the Western world seem to have lost some of our self-confidence. Should we NOT have tried to put an end to man’s exploitation of man? Should we NOT have tried to become nature’s masters and owners? Our noblest virtues were enlisted in the service of these twin missions, one in the political arena and the other in the domain of science and technology. Yet we are prepared to look back on our enthusiastic and right-thinking youth as young Germans look to their greying parents and ask: “what criminal orders did we follow?” “will we say that we didn’t know?”
Structuring our societies around the premise that there are two types of entities human and non-human…and that they exist on a different level of metaphysical worth… practically ENSURES that there will be a dynamic that emerges of self vs other. And when it does… it will not just be TREES and ROCKS that will be SEEN as the OTHER, as the OBJECTS for human beings to harvest and do their bidding with. Invariably, Latour says, groups of PEOPLE become the objects to harvest as well.
People that happened to be born living on top of the wrong substance buried in the ground. People that happened to be born with the wrong skin color or gender. Where ever you can find PEOPLE who are voiceless…they will be treated more or less the same as the voiceless trees and rocks of the world.
There’s a FURTHER cost though when it comes to our relationship to science and technology. For hundreds of years it was possible to think of scientific and technological progress as being completely separate from culture…as operating in its own unique domain of study. When a new piece of technology was produced…it didn’t necessarily have the ability to change the lives of everyone on a global scale, we were dealing with vacuum pumps and calculators at the time.
But the more advanced the science and technology get…the less USEFUL it is to understand them in isolation. Latour says that technology is not just, as SOME people say, a disinterested TOOL that can be used for either good or evil. It’s not just a tool…technology carries with it a type of latent morality…and it’s not good enough to just understand it on its own…we have to have the ability to understand HOW THAT technology is going to impact other actants once it is released out into the world. How will it affect existing technologies…how will it affect the way people live their lives…how will it affect the rest of the planet.
To think of science, technology and culture as distinct, separate realms from each other is not just some… cute mistake anymore, (goofy) oh you’re so adorable…you’re thinking like an outdated modern person again! …this may be an adorable mistake in a world of vacuum pumps and calculators…but in a world of gene therapy, facial recognition and atomic bombs… to not have a way to study and understand the relationship BETWEEN science, technology and culture is downright immoral, to Bruno Latour. Something like climate change…early in the 20th century was something we could delude ourselves into believing was PURELY an ECOLOGICAL issue, to be studied and dealt with SOLELY by EXPERTS in the field of ecology. But Latour says climate change is no longer a question of ecology…now it’s become a question of survival.
If the goal that we’re SHOOTING for on this planet is human flourishing…then Latour thinks we have to understand that the flourishing of NON-human entities is an absolutely essential part of that as well. And he’s NOT just talking about planting trees and sticking your disgusting reusable straw everywhere. He actually floats the hypothetical idea of there being what he calls a Parliament of things.
You know in the same way a Parliament brings in representatives to speak on behalf of various constituencies, various groups of people with different interests…a Parliament of THINGS would aim to give VOICE to a DIFFERENT kind of voiceless entity. People could come and speak on behalf of the interests of these non-human entities that CAN’T speak for themselves but nonetheless play an important role in the politics of the flourishing of the planet. Just one interesting idea of many.
You know, there is so much more to cover just in this book We Have Never Been Modern, let alone in the rest of the work of Bruno Latour who, thankfully still alive and well here today, highly recommend doing your own reading on him or harassing me online to do more episodes on him. More so than most other thinkers Latour always gets me to think about how will the average person be thinking about things in the next couple hundred years…and WHY will they almost CERTAINLY see ME the way I see people in the middle ages? Everytime I scoff at something he says and then think later, wait COULD that be the way people are going to think about stuff? This is one of the things I LOVE about philosophy and there aren’t many things more DIFFICULT to see past than this modern subjectivity we were all born into.
But something ELSE I really love about Latour that he doesn’t seem to get much credit for…is just how OPTIMISTIC his theory of knowledge is. You know...in the world of the OTHER metaphysical premise...where postmodernists and positivists practically want to kill each other...EVEN if you win the argument you're still left at the end of the day trying to answer skeptics about how we can EVER know anything for certain. The world of things in themselves ALWAYS LIES BEYOND that veil of subjectivity. But in Latour's work… there's a little more hope I think. To Latour, scientists are not studying the raw, isolated phenomena of nature...the more accurate description is that scientists are entering into relationships WITH non human things. So maybe robot mark zuckerberg is on to something. Maybe we need a social network for actants. Maybe if we study HOW scientists FORM these relationships...and how those relationships form together with other relationships to create verified social facts that we all acknowledge as true...if we can do that. Then maybe we can gain a LOT of information about how knowledge works from a new perspective...that DOESN'T rely on us being CERTAIN about accessing the intrinsic structure of the universe. No disrespect was intended in this episode to robot mark zuckerberg by the way.
Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
