Not quite done with the Latour article. The language is a lil bit painful… very Husserlian-like Phenomenology speak. My favorite part of this article thus far is that I can’t remember not knowing so many words and having to look up completely blind. I forget meaning all the time but it is rare to come across words you just have never visually seen before. Kudos to Bruno. Of course that contributes to a problem. I have to say for the first 15 pages I was feeling a lil undereducated in the discussion to read correctly. While I have heard their names everywhere, I have very limited knowledge of Whitehead and Popper (they are philosophy and weirdly do not enter the literary criticism discussion very often). Also, the article reads as if it is speaking to a problem or counter-argument that a reader involved in the discussion would know. Having reached deeper into the “negation of a position” (my term- Latour defines most of his ideas in opposition to others rather than positing them directly) this changed, epistemology is not really what he is talking about… Ontology is directly apparent. Just the fact that he has to reject language discussion while using “logos” and “graphy” as proofs brings philology and the philosophy of language to the table (his quip trying to put down Quine is as ineffective as it is misguided- this Quine bit is pure opinion on my part- most folk don’t like Quine). I’m reticent to throw down quotes ’cause his argument doubles back on itself so some concerns maybe assuaged by the end but my hypothesis now is that this argument is a shield for something really simple and may be way closer to a discussion of hermeneutics than Latour is comfortable with-
Talk about razor’s edge…
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