Precis on Latour

Sorry for the late post; technology loves me not.   

Latour exclaims that the objective of social science and the very definition of what is social has come under scrutiny and transformed because of the apocalyptic ecological crisis. He is vehement that the discipline should focus on associations rather than specific and (Latour implies) insignificant topics that miss the more important understanding of the whole. The lecture was given to and for the annual meeting of British sociologists but the appeal of his argument is broadened to include all ‘earthlings’; the ecological crisis is the daunting and imminent peril that faces all humankind. Though he mainly addresses the sociologists because they are the physical audience present before him, he implores every being to realize that uncovering and understanding the entire chaining of our world is absolutely necessary for the potential discovery of a solution to the universal ecological problem.

    Latour presents the potential counter arguments in the form of a question. “What has this to do”, you could object, “with the topic of the social sciences? No matter how you define what humans do, sociologists can still study their shifting ‘identities’, their moving ‘technologies’, their newly formed ‘relationships’. ‘Social connections’ will always be ‘social connections’.”It is necessary for Latour to make these acknowledgements because he makes radical assertions and uproots the definition of social and the fundamentals of an entire discipline. He uses his refutation to delineate between the incorrect view of sociology that the opposition holds (emancipation and modernization) and introduces the proper perspective of sociology as explicitation and attachments. Latour is dedicated to clarity in his argumentation and is explicit in his thesis, “This is why, many years ago, I proposed that we shift the definition of sociology from the study of “social” connections to the study of “associations”- keeping the same Latin etymology but refusing to limit the inquiries to one domain only, as if, side by side, we had “social”, “psychological”, “legal”, “biological” and “economic connections, each with its own science and protocols.

    The main warrant for his argument is that the current usage of first empiricism, which ignores meaningful aspects of observation such as human sensory experience, fails to incorporate the associations that allow this form of science to make meaningful contributions to society. Latour does not use figurative language extensively but metaphorizes non-social modes of connections with lego building on the seventh page. Though it does give the audience a visualization the metaphor was clumsy (which Latour admits immediately in the next paragraph) and did not add any explanatory or argumentative force to his point about heterogeneous connections.
   
    Though Latour promises in the beginning not to add another “gloomy prognosis”, he leaves us with Lovelock’s theory that we have about forty three years to change radically and shift the foundations of things we as individuals have taken for granted and ascribed to if we are to have hopes of preserving ourselves and the achievements of our race. Not gloomy indeed.