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The Morality of a Speed Bump. Latour.

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Introducing Bruno Latour. Over the past 20+ years Latour has been carefully and thrillingly re-designing the entire landscape of our lives, and increasingly people are noticing what he's been up to. It really is no exaggeration to say that the world as Latour sees it is remarkable, and very little of the ways we commonly understand things survives unscathed. Not that he in any way imposes a new order on things, or concocts vast fantastic scifi-type fantasies. And he doesn't have a critical bone in his body, so he's not out there debunking things either - he sees critique as a tired, misguided activity. On the contrary his genius (and this is probably what defines all genius) is to show us what we're already doing but don't even notice.  Rather than attempt some encyclopaedic biography and bibliography, I'll first list probably his most fundamental changes to the way we think about things, and then use one example to show a bit of the flavour of his work. As back
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Travel

Delving into Deleuze again while writing about cinema reminded me about travel. Deleuze had very similar views about travel to mine - he didn't like it. There's a lovely passage in a book of short essays he wrote towards the end of his life that explains why he felt this way. It's linked also to the nature of knowledge and knowing, and its relationship to life. Academics' lives are seldom interesting. They travel of course, but they travel by hot air, by taking part in things like conferences and discussions, by talking, endlessly talking. Intellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything. I'm not an intellectual, because I can't supply views like that, I've got no stock of views to draw on. What I know, I know only from something I'm actually working on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I have to learn everything all over again. It's really good not having any view or idea about this or that point. We don'
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Here Comes the Sun

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(The Sun. All Worship.) Wish I could get my head around copyright of images. I throw all sorts of things up here on the blog which I think are royalty-free, like the glowing beauty above. The end of Daylight Savings (DS) this weekend. The sun-worshippers extended it by more than a month this year, and I've had the joy of utter darkness while fumbling about in the mornings getting ready for work. Normally we'd need to wait until winter for that privilege, but thanks to the growing cult of daylight we'll now have a month or so of more light in the mornings, and then back to black. My circadian rhythms are wreaking their usual havoc on sleep quality, they don't know which way is up. They're too dim to understand the genius logic of shifting waking and bed times arbitrarily twice a year, so that millions of precious dears can work the same insane slave days and still have some daylight to come home and mow the lawn in. The same clever dicks trot out the same manurial s
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