Latour Quotes & Sayings

Technology is society made durable. — Bruno Latour

India is a reservoir of alternative interpretations of what the global is, and these ways of viewing the world need to be exposed. — Bruno Latour

What is an organization actually, even in organization theory, even in the most classical sense in management, if not a serial redescription which starts again (and it's true) every morning. — Bruno Latour

I refuse to believe that Southern pride stems from the pain we've inflicted on others. Southern pride comes from what we've built together. In our music and art and innovation.

In the people who honor us by taking our culture out into the world and celebrating it. It comes from people seeking us out, and flocking here to experience all that we know and love.

We are all neighbors. We are all Southerners. This is OUR culture, and it means what WE choose it to mean.

So, yes. I'll say it again - Southern Pride is good collard greens.

Death to the flag.

Long live the South. — Jason Latour

Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy. — Bruno Latour

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect. — Bruno Latour

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices. — Bruno Latour

And here I want to interject and say that Heidegger is an absolute occasionalist and has no theory of time despite "time" being included in the title Being and Time — Bruno Latour

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms — Bruno Latour

You who are on the inside, don't condemn my lack of faith too quickly; you who are on the outside, don't be too quick to mock my overcredulity; you who are indifferent, don't be too quick to wax ironic about my perpetual hesitations. — Bruno Latour

The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don't know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol! — Bruno Latour

Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them — Bruno Latour

You who are on the inside, this world terrifies you because, according to you, it's 'without a divine master'. But don't you see that it's also without a human master? You who are on the outside, this call for renewal of 'God' horrifies you because, according to you, it would bring back the old tyranny of the divine. Don't you see that this world is forever without a creator? — Bruno Latour

Reality is what resists. — Bruno Latour

My interest is that there is a disconnect between the science and the size of the threat that people mention about nature, the planet and the climate, and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep pretty well. — Bruno Latour

Cuzco - the place that my friends and the aforementioned anthropologists inhabit - is a socionatural territory composed by relations among the people and earth-beings, and demarcated by a modern regional state government. Within it, practices that can be called indigenous and nonindigenous infiltrate and emerge in each other, shaping lives in ways that, it should be clear, do not correspond to the division between nonmodern and modern. Instead, they confuse that division and reveal the complex historicity that makes the region "never modern" (see Latour 1993b).5 What I mean, as will gradually become clear throughout this first story, is that Cuzco has never been singular or plural, never one world and therefore never many either, but a composition (perhaps a constant translation) in which the languages and practices of its worlds constantly overlap and exceed each other. — Marisol De La Cadena

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this. — Bruno Latour

Be not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers arenas in which to gather. — Bruno Latour

Science does not enter a chaotic society to put order into it anymore, to simplify its composition, and to put an end to controversies. It does enter it, but to add new uncertain ingredients ... to all the other ingredients that make up the collective experiments. When scientists add their findings to the mix, they do not put an end to politics; they add new ingredients to the collective process. — Bruno Latour

In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the 'Glorious Alliance' between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen. — Bruno Latour

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term. — Bruno Latour

Alas, the historical name is 'actor-network-theory', a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept. — Bruno Latour

Father Latour began to tell them about his friendly relations with Protestants in Ohio, but they had not room in their minds for two ideas. — Willa Cather

Using a slogan from ANT, you have 'to follow the actors themselves', that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts best define the new associations that they have been forced to established. — Bruno Latour

The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Machines are the concealed wishes of actants which have tamed forces so effectively that they no longer look like forces — Bruno Latour

Nancy Cartwright here in this School has written the funniest paper on scientific method ever, by taking the average advice from all the books about scientific method, and they are extreme banalities — Bruno Latour

In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely. — Jose Latour

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent. — Bruno Latour

[Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.

-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17 — Randall Styers

The Bishop observed later that Trinidad was treated very much like a poor relation or a servant. He was sent on errands, was told without ceremony to fetch the Padre's boots, to bring wood for the fire, to saddle his horse. Father Latour disliked his personality so much that he could scarcely look at him. His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth
were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby's legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but
ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table - and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another. — Willa Cather

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.
Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made "fewer mistakes" than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. — Graham Harman

The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics. — Bruno Latour

We would be better off thinking of nature as a tiger than as a docile and compliant automaton that can never threaten our survival. — Bruno Latour

My kingdom for a more embodied body — Bruno Latour