ATDTDA (2): Merle's dream, 56ff #1

[Paul Nightingale]

One reason for mentioning Latour here is that his name has cropped up in the
last couple of days. With regard to Pasts Beyond Memory, Bennett starts with
Foucault and governmentality, moving on to Latour:

"Yet, if the impetus of Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian scholarship has
encouraged the development of an analytic gaze which looks closely at the
'microphysics of power' - in which power exists in and through the technical
forms in which it is exercised - it has often proved less adept at
undertaking such detailed, close-up inspection than other intellectual
traditions which share a sense of the importance of the mundane
particularities of technical arrangements and processes. This is especially
true of the now extensive body of work defined by the confluence of
interests and procedures between science studies, techno-science and
actor-network theory. The work of Bruno Latour, in particular, has had an
evident influence on recent approaches to museums, especially those that aim
to engage with the new relations of action and effect that are produced by
their distinctive forms of classification and exhibition. It is,
accordingly, to this literature that I look when zooming in on particular
aspects of museum practice to identify the mechanisms that are at work
within them and the new entities they shape and produce." (6)

In particular, Bennett cites Latour's Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987)
and The Pasteurisation of France (Harvard UP, 1988).