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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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Something About Size

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Something about size. If you use a microscope, telescope, or even climb to the top of a building, you’ll feel like you’re seeing more in some ways. But actually that’s not true, you’re definitely seeing things you couldn’t see without doing those things, but notice how what you gain in one dimension you lose in another. Looking from the top of a building let’s you see a wider extent of the city, but what you gain in width you lose in detail. Ditto for a microscope or telescop e, what you gain in magnification you lose in width, dramatically.  The point being, every point of view sees roughly the same amount of stuff. There isn’t a better one that lets you see more than another, it’s always a trade off between detail and width. And I think that’s also true for any part of life where we use ‘point of view’. A CEO looking at graphs about their company is not seeing more about the company than the employees, they’re just swapping detail for width. A government doesn
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