vv: ain't no "inanimate objects"

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 come get to this: "why is it so difficult to develop other theories of action? 
 that's because it is so eminently important for the modernist ethos to demand a 
 decision between this which one - as a free and naked human being - produces,  
 and this which is a by no one made fact out there. the entire work of the 
 moderns has aimed to make both agents, human being and object, unable to play 
 any other role than the one being opposed to each other. no wonder they cannot 
 be used for anything else! it's simply a question of ergonomics: unsuitable for 
 any other job.
 but as soon as the two halves are put together again, the way of expression 
 changes at once. facts are fabricated; we make facts, means: there is a 
 'fait-faire'. of course the scientist doesn't think out the facts - who has 
 ever thought  o u t  something? this is another fable, symmetrical to the one 
 of the homo faber, and this one is about the imaginations of the mind. that 
 people have minds, i do not question, but the mind is not a worlds creating 
 despot, who thinks out facts according to his preferences. thinking gets 
 adopted and changed by non-human beings, which correspondingly modify their   
 ways and stories after the scientist's work has given them this opportunity.  
 only modernists believe that there is only the alternative between an agent à  
 la sartre and an inert thing out there, for instance a root on which one pukes. 
 in practice every scientist knows that things do also have a history; newton 
 'takes place' for gravity, pasteur 'happens' to the microbes. (...) 
 the debate is about control. (...) who has ever controled an action? please 
 show me a novellist, painter, architect or cook who was not, like god, 
 surprised, overtaken, carried away by this which no longer she did but, 
 together, they."

 --- bruno latour: pandora's hope. an essay on the reality of science studies  
     (hup, 1999); here quoted in own re-translation from the german edition: die 
     hoffnung der pandora, ffm 2000: suhrkamp, pp. 346ff. ---  



 sippin' glendronach, inhalin' the chronic...kfl