What is given in experience?

Boundary 2

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 223-235

  Latour, Bruno ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247675497     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-1-223     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. From Cosmopolitiques - Tome 1: La guerre des sciences (Paris: La découverte & Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1996),
2. to Cosmopolitiques - Tome 7: Pour en finir avec la tolérance (Paris: La Découverte-Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1997).
3. Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy in Brussels. Only a small part of her works is available in English: Power and Invention, with a foreword by Bruno Latour (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
4. The Invention of Modern Science, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
5. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, trans. Deborah Van Dam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996);
6. and Leon Chertock and Isabelle Stengers, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan, trans. Martha Noel Evans (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
7. I have attempted to present Stengers's epistemological principle in "How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies," in Part 3: Body Collective of "Bodies on Trial," ed. Marc Berg and Madeleine Akrich, special issue, Body and Society 10, no. 2-3 (June-September 2004): 205-29.
8. Here is a standard definition of the problem: "However, we must admit that the causality theory of nature has its strong suit. The reason why the bifurcation of nature is always creeping back into scientific philosophy is the extreme difficulty of exhibiting the perceived redness and warmth of the fire in one system of relations with the agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen with the radiant energy from them, and with the various functioning of the material body. Unless we produce the all-embracing relations, we are faced with a bifurcated nature; namely, warmth and redness on one side, and molecules, electrons and ether on the other side. Then the two factors are explained as being respectively the cause and the mind's reaction to the cause" (Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920], 32).
9. On the political dimension of this divide, see my own footnote on Whitehead's argument in Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
10. Gabriel Tarde, one of the (forgotten) founders of sociology, and, like Whitehead, a decisive influence on Deleuze, called "societies" what is called here "organisms," but with very much the same argument. Witness his slogan "Exister c'est différer." See his Monadologie et sociologie, réédition (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1999).
11. One of his most original books lives again on the Web: G. Tarde, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (1899), trans. Howard C. Warren (Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche Books, 2000), available at http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/∼econ/ ugcm/3ll3/tarde/laws.pdf.
12. On the difference between the two, see my own attempt, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," in "The Future of Criticism - A Critical Inquiry Symposium," special issue, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-48.
13. A colleague of Stengers, another Belgium philosopher, Vinciane Despret, has developed empirically in great detail this crucial insight. See her books, Ces émotions qui nous fabriquent: Ethnopsychologie de l'authenticité (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1999);
14. and Quand le loup habitera avec l'agneau (Paris: Les Empêcheurs, 2002).
15. For a nice but totally derivative rehashing of the same old arguments, see James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
16. See the small but marvelous book written by Stengers and a dissident biologist, Pierre Sonigo, L'évolution, Collection Mot à Mot (Les Ulis, France: EDP Sciences, 2003).
17. If you realize a potential, nothing really happens, since "everything was already there in potentia." If you actualize virtualities, it is only retrospectively, because of the radically new event of the actual occasion, that the real can be seen as what has emerged out of what was possible. On this distinction, see François Zourabichvili, Le vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003).