Got some ‘splaining to do

“Explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further.  We do not look for a stabilized and simplified description before we begin to propose and explanation.  On the contrary, we use what they do to an innovation or a statement to define the actors, and is from them and them alone that we extract any ’cause’ we might need.”

-Bruno Latour, 1991 (“Technology is Society Made Durable” in A Sociology of Monsters.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 121)

(Multi)cultural relativism

“The impression of great open-mindedness given by multiculturalism should not hide the price that peoples had to pay for the preservation of their existence in the form of culture. “You possess meaning, perhaps,” they were told, “but you no longer have reality, or else you have it merely in the symbolic, subjective, collective, ideological form of mere representations of a world that escapes you, although we are able to grasp it objectively. And don’t be mistaken, you have the right to cherish your culture, but all others likewise have this same right, and all cultures are valued by us equally.” In this combination of respect and complete indifference, we may recognize the hypocritical condescension of cultural relativism…To the eyes of the cultural relativist, those cultural differences make no real difference anyway, since, somewhere, nature continues to unify reality by means of laws that are indisputable and necessary, even if they are not as charming and meaningful as these delightful productions which human whim and arbitrary categories have engendered everywhere.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 14-15)

These Old Wars

“[W]e are not faced with a peace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civilizations,” …a war of the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the so-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis. Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and nothing proves either that this war cannot be won. What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly and not covertly. The worst course would be to act as if there were no war at all, only the peaceful extension of Western natural Reason using its police forces to combat, contain, and convert the many Empires of Evil. That is the mistake those who still believe they are moderns are in danger of making. On the other hand, if we are going to bring the wars of modernization to an end, we cannot afford to declare that all bets are off, that premodern savagery will be met with premodern savagery, that senseless violence will answer senseless violence. No, what is needed is a new recognition of the old war we have been fighting all along—in order to bring about new kinds of negotiation, and a new kind of peace.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 3-4)