Uffa Burnstein

I’ve struggled with this one. Keeping the attention on the reading was a little of a challenge. Not very much my style of writing I guess, I don’t really like ranting.

Yet some interesting points in what I see as an attempt to move the concept of *embodied knowledge* that we saw in Hayles to the larger spectrum of the ‘body of science’. Latour wants to re-write the epistemology of science in such a way that it accounts for all the missing parts (or secondary qualities), the different *layers* that constitute the phenomonological part of experience.

He propose articulation as the epistemological tool, the path of accounting for all the *layers of differences* that make reality such a complex matter, impossible to reduce by simplification. “The more you articulate controversies, the wider the world becomes”. Again Gregory Bateson somehow pops up in my head – in his way of preaching the need for a new epistemology to navigate this complexity and choosing a context based solution to the dilemma. The history of science seems therefore to be evolving. We needed to fix certain assumptions about reality to proceed deeper into things and now we need to set those assumptions free and include them in the system as “movable parts”.

The world according to Latour is again a very post-modern world, a “multiverse” made of layers of reality in which knowing the world means standing inside, participating, *learning by being affected*, allowing reality to pass through, our bodies like filters… where inevitably they loose their subjectivity, or better they add themselves to the composition of infinite layers.  Massumi and Deleuze come to mind here, reality as a continuous construction of different forces, glued together by affect, intensity.

Some of the considerations about science needing to be interesting and risky I found unnecessary. Is there really the need to state this?  That there are better scientific results with fecundity, originality, creativity, etc, we maybe knew already. I don’t want to believe that traditional science would require boring unimaginative efforts… In these parts, I sense that latour is ranting more than focusing on the more justifyied criticism to objectivity, distance, detachment of scientific method.

Another good point is about the tendency of obeying to scientific authority. Disputability is something that is needed in any epistemological effort, and I have always noticed this blind trust in what is deemed scientific, despite the fact that scientific assumptions and laws are continualy being challenged and made obsolte by further discoveries.

In this effort Latour’s wants to bring forward Stengers and Despret’s message that this new extensive methodology of science does not mean that the criteria of judgement have become looser, on the contrary he stresses the fact that BECAUSE OF THIS COMPLEXITY, it is very difficult and rare to have good science, in the same way it is of having good art.

more later…