spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation

Philosophical anthropology with Bruno Latour, Maison Francaise, Oxford

Bruno Latour was in the country last week and, more importantly, in Oxford for a few days. Although I missed his ‘A Compositionist Manifesto’ on the Wednesday (as I was over at Royal Holloway), I was able to attend both the session of ‘Mapping Controversies’ at the School of Geography on Thursday morning, and the launch of his newly translated book on law, at the Maison Francaise the same afternoon. A recent addition to the MSc in ‘Nature, Society and Environmental Policy’ (NSEP), Mapping Controversies is a:

course developed from an EU project MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies on Science for POLitics) and a course on mapping controversies first taught by Bruno Latour to students at the École des Mines in Paris. The online version of the course has been developed jointly by Sciences Po, MIT and the École des Mines (http://www.demoscience.org/). As well as Oxford, the University of Manchester (Department of Architecture), the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne and the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies) are also part of the Mapping Controversies programme.

The session began with a series of presentations of group projects and their particular controversies, followed by a conversation between Andrew Barry and Bruno Latour. Taking matters of concern rather than matters of fact as his point of departure¹, Latour explained that through MACOSPOL he was trying to create a platform for mapping, an opportunity to orient yourself both in a map and in a controversy. Arguing that the web has not been exploited well so far, Latour contended that if a website can be printed, it’s a bad one (as an aside, this one can be printed but it doesn’t look the same so perhaps it’s not all bad). Demoscience, part of the larger MACOSPOL project, is an attempt at developing a handbook of good practice as there are no standards for websites, as well as differently visualising the micro and the macro. But there is much more to be done, in particular in terms of being able to navigate from one controversy to another, and how you might enter a controversy (a particular style of front-page), to navigate a matter of concern. Indeed, the very notion of controversy is itself controversial, Latour noted, as it is is positivist but he claimed it had become a technical term.  What he was most interested in talking about was what is the effect of a well-designed web-site, and how it  might encourage intervention in a debate (or even transform the debate). Latour seemed to be advocating a particular approach when he argued that the general public does not exist (and that there are many intermediary steps in the fabrication of any public), privileging smaller cases as they (1) are easier, as there are fewer scientific paper to read and (2) enable you to see how an issue becomes public. The talk ended with a few comments on Geography, as we were told that it is ideally placed as the only discipline to have maintained the connection between the physical and human:

(AB) The connection is sometimes tenuous… and actually, I think that, one of the importances of this kind of work is precisely to re-think what these connections are.

(BL) It’s tenuous, it’s disputed, in many Geography departments… But it’s there!

The talk in the afternoon was titled: ‘Law as a special type of social link: a field study of a French Supreme Court’.

After a long period of fieldwork on one of the French supreme Courts, [Latour] has published a monograph La Fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat. The English translation, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Polity Press, Cambridge) has just been published.²

Latour’s philosophical anthropology, as it was called by one the panelists, sought to engage with the question: if the social is made of associations, how can these associations connect? Law, for Latour, is one of these ‘connectors’, rather than a domain as such. The paper was accompanied by a PowerPoint slideshow, displaying a few key themes – such as A place of justice, A paper technology, A world of files, A strange institution – and plenty of photos (although none of him, as has been noted before by Sarah Whatmore³). The talk was recorded and can be streamed (as well as downloaded) here.

The following day, Latour was involved in the ‘Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition‘ conference over at the Tate Britain in London. Although I was unable to attend there is a report by a geographer from the Open University over at her blog.

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This post is tagged anthropology, geography, intervention, latour, mapping