“Latour for Architects” is now open access • Hacker News Board

Post by zahma » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

jacomyma wrote: post #7

jacomyma wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latour's work is broad and covers various disciplines: anthropology, sociology, philosophy... His books tend to be either broad and hard to read (An Inquiry on Modes of Existence) or easy but narrow (Pandora's Hope). Albena Yaneva's book is easy to read and broad. It covers Latour's work at large in simple terms, and not just for architects, in a way that Latour himself never took the time to write. Source: I worked…

While I am at it, let me paste below a Twitter thread I wrote about Latour when he passed. It may help understand his work from the angle of the HN culture. --- Bruno Latour has passed. We lost a true Wizard, larger than I can write. I had the pleasure to work with him at the Sciences Po médialab for a few years. I came as an engineer and left as an aspiring researcher. Here is what Latour's work has to offer to engi…

You explained Latour's ideas better than he was able to. I took a course of his on environmental politics a few years ago at Sciences Po. He had many interesting gems to share with us, but the narrative of the class was lost in the chaos of multiple speakers and unstated goals. Though it was frustrating to pick up on the thread that he knew linked so many topics together, I particularly enjoyed how he tried to drill down on what is "nature" and how we use the word "natural" to define so many things. Another one of his brilliant rhetorical questions was when we began to exploit nature for money, whether for gas or to charge people to enter parks. Of course we also touched on Gaia and Lovelock.

For those who are interested in learning a bit more about his work, the NyT profiled him some years ago[1]. It was interesting because he had been assailed by the scientific community for undermining some of their assertions about scientific fact as some kind of a tangible truth to be held, but he seemed to have had a late-career change of heart.

1- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos... (https://archive.ph/ULKzn)