Bruno Latour Quotes on Knowledge
Bruno Latour (1947–2022), the French theorist whose Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar) and Science in Action (1987) reshaped the late-twentieth-century sociology of scientific knowledge, gave the actor-network theory its most influential statement in the methodological injunction to follow the actors — human and non-human alike — through the heterogeneous networks within which scientific facts are constructed and stabilized. We Have Never Been Modern (1991) extends the framework to a general philosophical diagnosis of the modern dichotomies (nature vs. society, object vs. subject, science vs. politics) whose purification is on Latour's analysis the very work that modernity's actual hybrid networks unceasingly subvert.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bruno Latour:
“We have never been modern.”
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Attributed to Bruno Latour:
“Nothing is by itself either knowable or unknowable; everything is translated.”
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Attributed to Bruno Latour:
“The fate of facts and machines is in later users' hands; their qualities are a consequence, not a cause, of collective action.”
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“Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” Critical Inquiry 30 , (Winter 2004)”
What has happened to those who, like Heidegger , have tried to find their ways in immediacy, in intuition, in nature, would be too sad to retell—and is well known anyway. What is certain is that those pathmarks off the beaten track led indeed nowhere. -
“Bruno Latour in: The only shibboleth the West has is science , The Times of India , 4 April 2011.”
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 reality, society . Modernisation is to work towards this. -
“Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy. If there is one thing which philosophy should not do, it is to try to explain anything.”
Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Peter Erdelyi. The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE. 2011. p.67 -
“Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Peter Erdelyi. The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE. 2011. p.67”
Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy. If there is one thing which philosophy should not do, it is to try to explain anything.