What is the best book to introduce me to Bruno Latour/ or ANT?

>almost any serious engagement of science studies is going to require familiarizing yourself with the logical empiricists

Literally laughed out loud

Not because they were right (pro-tip they were very wrong about almost everything), but because a tremendous amount that comes after them is a reaction to them. They structured the debate.

Moreover, they raised good questions. There are real and deep issues about explanation and confirmation in science. There are real and deep issues about how to conceptualize scientific theories and the relations between them. There are real and deep questions about how scientific language is erected and maintained. Much of subsequent philosophy of science also wants to answer these questions, and it's useful to start by asking "OK, so how do we do better than the logical empiricists?"

Ok though stop with the protip please
Also, I don't get the appeal of the "French are charlatans" meme, it's quite disappointing if you are in the social sciences field. You can dive into sociology of science with Latour without any problem, it's a very rich way to follow scientists work if you happen to do ethnography.

Well, good. I retract my shitpost.

OK sorry about the "protip"s, it's condescending.'

The field work in Laboratory Life is interesting. The metaphor of "machines for transforming papers into papers" is provocative. The theoretical outlook can combat a tendency to underplay the role of social factors in scientific practice. But in my opinion it sheds no interesting light on the central questions here, such as motivation of the sciences, or the truth-conduciveness of scientific social structures, or the dynamics of growth and recession among different research traditions, or how practical considerations enter into theory construction and management. Compared to work by Hull, Kitcher, Laudan, Shapin/Shaffer, Peter Galison, etc., it is superficial, in my opinion.

Of course, I suppose we can dispute what the central questions /really are/ in this field. But it has always struck me that Latour significantly distorts scientific practice and willfully ignores things that are of great importance. (And, if you read various sources about the dynamics of French intellectual life, it becomes plausible that for many, it's more important to be provocative than to do rigorous work---hence the meme.)

philosophy of science =/= STS

>(And, if you read various sources about the dynamics of French intellectual life, it becomes plausible that for many, it's more important to be provocative than to do rigorous work---hence the meme.)
I know we're on Veeky Forums, but once again if you're in the field you owe yourself to refrain from such silliness

>such as motivation of the sciences, or the truth-conduciveness of scientific social structures, or the dynamics of growth and recession among different research traditions, or how practical considerations enter into theory construction and management
Did we read the same books? I fail to see how you can like Shaffer and not Latour. Laboratory Life was quite what you're waiting from sociology of science (ok, it's more micro than macro on the paradigm shifts, but it's an ethnography, one can't do everything). It was as much fascinating as the Leviathan and the Air-Pump was.
Not liking Latour's philosophy of ecology is a thing, but considering the STS sphere you can't simply deny Latour sociology of science influence, nor Latour's legacy. Eclectically advising a newbie to see other things is excellent. Simply telling someone to "flee Latour because he is a charlatan", when the person knows nothing about the field, isn't exactly prime pedagogy. Back in the day all of my teachers were Bourdieusians, they still taught us Boudon.

OK OK I let the discourse ethics of Veeky Forums get to me. Fine, fair enough.

could you potentially do an ethnography on other labourers other than scientists with Latour?

Yes, it's possible and that exists. Though in my opinion it works particularly well on things that are emerging, hence its power in science studies. It isn't necessarily "the way to go" for any objects. What are you thinking of?

I wondered if it worked say with the exact opposite level of prestige from law/scientists - the lowest prestige workers, janitors, garbagemen, cashiers, grocery store, people who create service instead of science

Well there's no "Latour's canvas" as such to simply apply, it's a school of thought inspiring your analysis or not.

When you're talking about the lowest prestige workers, you can by example have an interest for domination problematics, thus being more inspired by other schools (by example Bourdieu). You can chose to have a sociology of profession approach, soliciting again other authors. It's hard to determine which bibliography you have to solicit before guessing which problems attract you, what has already been written on the subject and before diving into the field itself.
That doesn't mean an Actor Network Theory work wouldn't have a place into such an ethnography : it isn't "booked" for high-classes at all. It may simply not be the best tool if you want to talk about domination. If you want to talk about a waste recycling procedure and its impacts, an ANT inspired work can very well be envisaged : it will probably include garbage-men, without being necessarily centred on their work. You can also ask yourself about such new garbage collection truck which change garbage-men job, and it will be more centred on them and their uses of the truck.

To be a little more clear : when you engage into an ethnography, who you read is determined by where you come from (your own university background), who already wrote on your subject, what is your problem, and who you are talking to.

I'm more or less an orthodox marxist from school, and also kind of tired of Foucault. I think you can already imagine the conclusions a foucualdian analysis of lowskilled/lowprestige workers would produce, but and so I'm working at trying to get past marx b/c it doesn't always translate well to microsociology/ethnography at all, plus it isn't exactly favoured by sociologists. I have less interest in humanism and more interest in how the organizational structures, and technologies used by workers in lowprestige work change the work and life. (more automation, union/vsnonunion)

Ok, I get it a little more. Then if you care about technologies Latour is I think someone to read. For the rest, did you read Boltanski?

I;ve never heard of him/her. Does he have a key concept or two that he is known for?

That's gonna be tough. I don't have a good grasp on his work enough, sorry. He was a student of Bourdieu but later moved away from him, particularly from the "unveiling" perspective. There's the key concept of "justification" that I can think of, if you can look it up. It's a very pragmatic sociology, I wish I can tell you more but sadly I would tell mistakes.
He notably wrote The new spirit of capitalism, and Of Justification which are quite big books in French sociology.

>but and so I'm working at trying to get past marx b/c it doesn't always translate well to microsociology/ethnography at all

wondering why this has been the case for you? thanks

alright cool i'll check him out : )

imo marxism is the grandtheory par excellence, and so his theory is mostly just about classes and I don't think his theory is interested (or even believes in) the individual.

but maybe more important, if you only use marxism for a study of workers you'll really jsut find that they lose their surplus value to profit for the bourgeoisie and they are commodities, like, the and the sky is blue. I think I have to go beyond marxism to see how that 'exploitation' occurs through a system, or action, or ideology.

It's a good starting premise, but to go micro I think I need to add something to marx.

I guess I should point out also that Michael Burawoy considers himself a marxian ethnography and has had a ton of success

I'm a STEmlord, and reading laboratory life was a huge shock.
I also want to say that this is a good thread.

What did you think of it?

I loved it. It was a chalenging read, and it certainly changed my mind on the nature of science. I don't understand why the scientific comunity shows such antagonism toward his work. I, for one, sensed respect toward science rather than agression in his demarche, and I wish my STEM fellow could be more understanding.

Yes, one can tell reading him he honestly likes scientists and sciences.
Sometimes people vaguely hear about humanities and Sokal affair and quickly forge an opinion... (they read "Latour claims reality is constructed" and all hell is unleashed). Though most of the people I met in sciences who read him liked him like you do (especially because he shows how a scientist gives more and more solidity to the things that are worked on). I didn't really have a feeling of bad reputation, most of the times it's more a general antagonism game between hard sciences / social sciences.

E. O. Wilson.

This is a text about literary studies, but check out Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious. it addresses a lot of the problems you're talking about, which mostly have to do with archaic, Soviet era reduction of Marxist critical dialectics. He's working in the tradition of Adorno, but an Adorno interpreted as "still" a Marxist, unlike say for example Martin Jay reads him as "post-Marxist" or whatever. So what you get is the negative-dialectical insistence on the autonomy of the individual object, with a recognition that our concept of that object is socially determined, and only on by class struggle. Class struggle is in fact positioned at quite an analytically distant remove from the individual object: there are several orders of mediation to pass through, each of which bears on our representation of the object, before its role in class struggle can be understood. None of these levels reduce to class struggle, but they are unintelligible without it, so the argument goes...

I don't know if any of that applies to our you conceptualize your sociological work, but it would be a pleasure talking this stuff out with you.

>only on by class struggle

*not only by

I have that one on pdf, but jameson is killing me, he's either too smart for me, or he writes for his peers only lol. His raymond chandler book was cool af tho.

I've gotta nail down dialectics a tiny bit more, then jump to the negative-dialectics. I do like how jameson is working with lacanian and althusserian ideas on ideology - except I'm just going through lacan and althusser primary sources myself now, I'm kinda interested to see if his conclusions are a lot different then mine.

Then lastly, how I turn that into an ethnographic research methodology - I'm open to wild and barely sensible suggestions

We were talking together earlier ( )
Did you already made any ethnography in the past? Or is it a new approach to you?

Part of the difficulty of that book is really grasping why he's arguing all of this stuff. The main point is the retention of expressive causality for individual cultural objects within a society understood as structurally causal.

Expressive causality is the base/superstructure model we're familiar with. For single texts, say, or for a strike at one factory, you can pretty accurately argue for economic determination.

I say "you can pretty accurately argue" in this direction because at this, local level of analysis, you'll be contested by other disciplines. Feminists, psychoanalysts, deconstructionists, new historicists, will all want a piece of the pie, and if you throw up your hands you give in to liberal pluralism.

But in that very observation you've moved to rather different cultural object, which is no longer the thing in question, but your reading of it in competition with everyone else's. Now, your ethnographic study has to contend with the norms of your entire discipline, but in so doing it can study the determinations therein.

By this point, though, you've sort of lost the thing itself and descended into academic quibbles, right? Not necessarily: you can look at academic study now as a unique phenomenon of the same society that produced the object of the ethnography. Now, the social contradictions expressed in the disciplines' different approaches to the object are mediated through the object itself, rather than through academic subjects merely.

In order to locate academia in relation to the field of the object (i.e., to literature as a commodity industry, or the factory labor as forces of production), you now have to call on Althusser's structural causality, because while the different particularities of those objects enjoy their "local autonomy," they are all still determined by the demands society confronts them with. You have to juggle the specificity of the object with the social forces bearing down on it, specifically as these relate the academic subject to the cultural object.

Where you go from here, I have no idea. This is just a sketch of a concrete application of what Jameson lays out in On Interpretation from that book. He is considerably more abstract here, and is really stuck in the marxist discourses he's responding to, but you start to get some idea of what this looks like in the practical chapters (3, 4, 5). The analysis of genres (ch. 2) pushes somewhat in the direction I mentioned with disciplinary reflexivity, but really the need for that is hinted at in the preface and early in the first chapter and never fully seized upon, whereas I more and more think it is the most important dimension confronting academics in cultural study today.

of course all of this is problematized at every turn by ideology. i used to get extremely paranoid about ideology because i read althusser a hard-kantian sense: the "imaginary relation" to society is my only reference thereto, and I have no way outside of it whatsoever. but that's what makes the last chapter very important, and why it sets the tone for the rest of jameson's career: you can't "step out" of ideology, but you wouldn't want to, because it is precisely what makes social life intelligible, this not only in terms of how your own actions (and, of course, the object of study) reproduce capitalist production, but also in terms of how these negate and attempt to see past it. the work, i think, is pressing through to this last and building new ideologies that see capitalism as dismantle-able, contingent, rather than ("ideologically") as permanent, invulnerable.

now, if my previous comments on how marxist analysis in this text outmaneuvers psychoanalysis (among others) serve as the negative, counter-ideological component of the relation to other intellectual lenses, jameson's remarks on freud in this text, understood in terms of that dialectic of ideology and utopia that closes out the book, comprises the positive element. here the watchword is recuperation: what can we take from freud, what must we leave? in this case, what jameson leaves behind is the ruthlessly individualizing character of psychoanalytic criticism as practiced in the states. the frankfurt school, specifically adorno, had long before dissolved this tendency by arguing how freud sets up the family as the point of the individual's socialization, and how the family is itself socially determined. but different strokes. what jameson is able to pick up in this reading is the revolutionary character of freud's "great narrative moments" of repression and revolt: this is what gives the book its title, The Political Unconscious, a place where social contradiction is repressed but the mechanism by which, in literature and culture at large, it revolts and comes bristling back to the surface.

Reassembling the Social. I've been reading a lot of this guy this past year. My prof said he's going to be this generation's Foucault

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These fucking humanities kids always think they can disregard logical positivism/empiricism with a derisive snort. If they could get serious for one second about reality and our attempts to understand it, about how our scientific theories relate to language, the world, and each other, and about how much sophisticated technical know-how it takes to understand our current best theories, let alone philosophize about them systematically, maybe they would realize how little ground they have to stand on in their dismissal. While you're jacking off to Baudrillard others are doing real work. Logical positivism/empiricism is dead, but the realistic spirit lives.

>my stem overlords deposited one food pellet in my nutrient tube for this post

>having so much ressentiment that you deny the reality of the world

>realism is the only philosophy that gets at the real world
>>realism does not concern reality in totu, but universals
>nominalism is actually more divorced from reality, even though it asserts that all that exists are particulars, which are all that is available to empirical, a posteriori experience
>implying realism, by allowing a priori universal knowledge, isn't in fact the first step toward denying reality.

fwiw I'm basically a Whiteheadian, so..

gwgipacmf (go with God in peace and curiosity, my friend)

I didn't read Reassembling the Social yet, what did you think of it?

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I think it would be interesting, and maybe even kind of funny, to do an analysis on say janitors the same way jameson does with literature.

i could probably do an even whackier article if i connected janitors to sex drive or death drive