Bruno Latour > Quotes

“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, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“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, Aramis, or The Love of Technology

“The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it's people to abject poverty.”
― Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

“My kingdom for a more embodied body”
― Bruno Latour

“Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy.”
― Bruno Latour, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“There is no control and no all-powerful creator, either – no more ‘God’ than man – but there is care, scruple, cautiousness, attention, contemplation, hesitation and revival.”
― Bruno Latour, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech

“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, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech

“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, We Have Never Been Modern

“Machines are the concealed wishes of actants which have tamed forces so effectively that they no longer look like forces”
― Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France

“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, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech

“Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“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, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“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, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“Few people will campaign for an alternative vision of black holes or magnetic inversion, but we know from experience that about soils, vaccines, earthworms, bears, wolves, neurotransmitters, mushrooms, water circulation, or the composition of air, the smallest study will immediately be plunged into a full-scale battle of interpretations. The Critical Zone is not a classroom; the relationship between researchers and the public is anything but purely pedagogical.
If we still had any doubts on this point, the pseudocontroversy over the climate suffices to dispel them. There is no evidence that any major corporation has spent a penny to produce ignorance about the detection of the Higgs boson. But denying the climatic mutation is another matter entirely: financing floods in. Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments.”
― Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ?

“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, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“But in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations. At this point, the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations. To the convenient shorthand of the social, one has to substitute the painful and costly longhand of its associations. The duties of the social scientist mutate accordingly: it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. 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 could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish.”
― Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“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, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“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, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“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 Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish, the “enemy of promises” as Lindsay Waters calls him, believes he defends science studies, my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball? What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?”
― Bruno Latour

“The hypothesis of this essay is that the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.”
― Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

“The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“The difficulty lies in the very expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.”
― Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime

“epistemological disaster”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“If, of course, to serial and redescription you add… how would I put it, punctual? …Or the key with which they maintain their subsistence. And in that sense serial redescription seems to be a very good definition for the social sciences as well as for philosophy. We accompany the task of the entities in their survival, so to speak, and their maintaining their subsistence in a very, very practical manner.”
― Bruno Latour, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“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, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE: The Latour and Harman at the LSE

“Politics is not about "freshly dead" people, but about the living ; not about ghoulish stories of the afterworld, but about gory stories of this world.”
― Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

“Saying “We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials,” does not lead to the same politics as saying “We are humans in nature.” The two are not made of the same cloth – or rather of the same mud.”
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

“In sum, then, our discussion is informed by the conviction that a body of practices widely regarded by outsiders as well organised, logical, and coherent, in fact consists of a disordered array of observations with which scientists struggle to produce order.”
― Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts