the epistemology of kitchens and oil refineries

Levi has said this sort of thing before, but for some reason it sounds especially compelling this sunny morning:

“In the past, I have often talked about knowledge in terms of cooking. Why? Precisely because the cook acts on a variety of objects through various tools, techniques, temperatures, pressures, etc., to produce local manifestations. This, I believe, is not unlike what experimental scientists do in their laboratories. The whole point is that we only discover the powers of objects through acting on them in a variety of ways. It is only in this way that we discover the power of objects to produce local manifestations.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite passages in Latour, when in Pandora’s Hope he urges us to abandon the optical metaphor of truth in favor of an industrial metaphor. Somehow, oil trapped in the geological seams of Saudi Arabia is translated through a series of steps until it finally becomes gas in a tank in Jaligny, France. That’s Latour at his most insightful and funniest, and it’s a very nice account of what truth is.

It’s perfectly possible to do exciting new philosophy without passing through Latour (Meillassoux does it, for instance). But I certainly think spending a bit of time with Latour increases one’s chances of escaping various snarling dogmas and stale clichés that continue to haunt a number of discussions. People who react to him in violently negative fashion are quite often the very people he’s targeting with his dismantling of the modernist split between pure nature and pure culture. (It’s usually the “pure nature” people who immediately hate his guts. Often the “pure culture” people mistake him for an ally for awhile, at least in the Anglophone world; in France, it’s often the other way around.)

If you haven’t read Latour before, there are many different places to start. I’ve known a number of unlikely prospects who had life-changing experiences with We Have Never Been Modern, a work that I’m willing to call the most important piece of philosophy of the past 20 years.

Pandora’s Hope is a good one, and of course I’m very fond of Irreductions (the appendix to The Pasteurization of France) as the foundation of what Latour does.

Reassembling the Social is another gem, though maybe not the best starting point if philosophy is your background.

I was nearly 30 before I’d read a word of Latour. So in that sense he’s not seeped down into my marrow as much as Heidegger has (you need to be younger and more impressionistic, early 20’s, for an author to sink that deeply into your world view). But I can certainly recall the excitement of reading We Have Never Been Modern for the first time.