We are All Latourians Now

An Epistemological Delirium: From the ‘Science Wars’ to the ‘Culture Wars’

The controversies surrounding most — if not all — current apocalyptic events are not merely matters of cognitive dissonance that can be solved by the production of facts. “Denegation poisons those who practice it as well as those who are presumed duped by it,” Latour wrote in his 2018 book Down to Earth. “In doing so, it proposes us to refocus our attention on ‘science in the making’ in relation to ‘matters of concern’.” Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Latour in Down to Earth, this presentation will situate Latour’s ecological “matters of concern” in relation to earlier debates in STS regarding relativism and “social constructions” — that were at the centre of the so-called “science wars,” concluding with the more current modes of politicizing science-as-made which have spilled over into a range of controversies over subjectivity and modes of embodiment, better known as “the culture wars,” which Latour himself referred to as “the brutalization of public discourse.” I argue that the links between politics and truth were not severed with the US presidential elections of 2016; they were already severed when political economy became based on the belief (or hope) that the earth is big enough for all of us, which for the sake of polemical clarity I will refer to (following Bernard Stiegler) as “the Neoliberal Jihad.”

Biography

Joost van Loon is Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory at Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany, and the author of “Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence” and “Media Technologies: Critical Perspectives.” He is also editor of the journal Space and Culture.

The Original Sins of Natural Religion

Bruno Latour’s collection of essays “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime” (2017) is based on a series of lectures inspired by the topic of “natural religion.” It is a “hybrid style for a hybrid subject addressed to a necessarily hybrid audience” who are alarmed about the “profound mutation in our relation to the world.” This profound mutation is what is increasingly called climate breakdown. While Latour sees the source of the problem in Nature/Culture, I see multiple origin stories to the problem of climate breakdown: domestication, colonialism, and 20th century modernization.

Biography

Juno Salazar Parreñas is Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of “Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation.”

The Empiricism Strikes Back

The shift from the early to late work of Bruno Latour arguably begins with “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” In this pivotal piece, Latour writes: “The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism” (2004, 231). Yes, wonderful—says I, an STS-minded but still quite traditionally empiricist philosopher of science. Other philosophers of science would agree, so why are we not all Latourians now? In this talk, I address this question, focusing on how Latour’s complex “matters of concern” can be made feel real, immediate, and perceptible to both philosophers and the public. I argue that science, properly understood in an STS fashion, is an extended form of perception — but we need the means for feeling it that way, for letting it strike us with the force of classical empiricism.

Biography

Joyce C. Havstad is a philosopher of science and values, with a background in scientific practice. She has worked in a soil ecology lab at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Reserve, in a gene expression lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, as philosopher-in-residence at the Field Museum of Natural History, and as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is now a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Utah — with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance.