Bruno Latour

I'm going to do at least a post a day up until the World Cup.

This is a quick one (bath filling now) on Bruno Latour, my favourite sociologist. I based my dissertation around some of his theories. I'll start with the conclusion, which is that he's really fun to watch delivering lectures. He makes being an academic look really good. Sorry I can't embed this, but check out this 3 min video - don't worry about the content, just check out his style:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x168gnv_fun-mooc-scientific-humanities_school

I've developed a serious city-crush on Paris over the last 12 months that I can't really explain, but yeah part of it I guess is the vision of being some kind of cool academic hanging out in the same bistros as Latour, Piketty etc, taking the Eurostar to deliver lectures at the LSE, drinking really good wine and eating three courses at every meal.

I'm not sure if there is any point in reading Latour if you are not a sociologist or a scientist, although Reassembling the Social is readable enough and the concepts can be easily applied to one's own interests. In fact Al's post about sauerkraut made me want to post about this - Latour's first major book was called The Pasteurisation of France. 

His main thing is about collapsing the distinction between the material and the social, and showing how our social relations are mediated by material things, which are not purely symbolic "mute intermediaries", but rather "mediators" with their own form of agency - a sort of non-intentional agency that allow them to distort, transform and mutate the "meaning" or the nature of the social relation that is flowing through them. This results in a sort of "slow sociology", where you are not allowed to explain things through concepts like "social forces" or "the rise of individualism" - it all has to be unpacked and reassembled first (hence the title).

Anyway you can Wikipedia the rest if you're interested - I just wanted to close by going back to what I wrote about Bourdieu a few posts ago. Bourdieu says our taste preferences are merely arbitrary weapons in a symbolic battlefield that is really about securing social distinction. Latour thinks this is total bullshit. The qualities of the thing itself have to have some input into how your taste is formed, he says, it's ridiculous to say otherwise. There may be symbolic attachments to certain things floating around in your head, but you can't just take the thing itself totally out of the equation.

As Latour ally Antoine Hennion argues, taste is an activity comprised of moments of attention to objects - tentative moments where we make ourselves passive to objects and allow them to work on us. He contrasts "drinking wine" with "drinking a wine" - i.e. drinking without really paying attention, versus doing that thing where you pause, sniff the wine, hold it on your tongue and have a little moment. In that moment, all of the stuff you've been told to think about wine is still there, but so is the wine itself.

It's an interesting model to use to think about taste, because it lets you account for the hipster/Guardian elements of taste without denying that we can actually genuinely like stuff.

ANYWAY what I'm taking forever to get to is that, unlike scholarship boy Bourdieu, Latour comes from a fairly privileged background - in fact, he comes from the Louis Latour winemaking family. I walked past him at the LSE after a lecture and wanted to ask him whether the wine thing was an influence on his "objects have agency too" notion - terrior, that kind of thing. But I decided not to, he was already talking to someone.