Blog Post #9 (Due Sunday 29 April 11:59 PM): 'Do you see why I am worried?'

'Clearer?  Did Robin say this article ("Has critique run out of steam?") was Latour being CLEARER?  Get real.  What about Heidegger, Serres, Wittgenstein, Whitehead and all those other dudes I've never read?...'

Be cool, as Jules tells us in Pulp fiction; nobody will get hurt.  You don't need to know Heidegger (but if you do, you can use him.)  The argument is clear without the references.

Ethics.  Protection.  Care.  

Remember this, from our syllabus?

We all know that the carbon-cycle geophysicists at East Anglia University suppressed the data questioning global warming. Well, no they didn't really—but because of the stories circulating in

popular media, a lot of people are sure they did. Questions of how findings are presented, written, circulated and used, are matters of ethics. So are the issues of who pays for scientific work and who profits from it. So are issues of what gets built and used. No science or technology (or any human activity) is 'innocent.'

Well, nothing IS innocent, but that doesn't mean that all beliefs and all actions that follow from them are equivalent.  Not at all.  Nor does it follow that we can't really know or decide.

So near the end of our work, it's good to return to the Big Question of why any of this matters--through the lens of Latour's article.  

Basically, Latour (and Ben and Robin) are worried about how critical work might create a sort of cynical hipsterism in which we decide that it doesn't matter if you 'believe in reality,' because there's no solid reality to believe in.  'Whatever....'  We're also worried that smart political manipulators (like Frank Luntz, the primary architect of the New Right strategy—more central than Grover Norquist, sneakier than Carl Rove) can USE 'critique' to undercut all rational, scientific issues they don't like.  (Note how he does it in The Wall Street journal, p. 226.)

--> Explain it to Mom (or somebody like her who matters to you).  (1) Find a small section of Latour's article—a sentence, a paragraph, a recurring idea, but something that's coherent and tight enough that you can work with it.  (2) Translate it into English.  This is the 'Mom' part. You aren't really writing to Mom, because it's a blog post for all to see, but think about what some specific, normal, ordinary, smart-but-not-science-studies-oriented person would need to get this concept in consciousness / culture / science / philosophy (if your Mom is a philosopher, think of somebody else), and explain it.  Work like Bruno—using Coke cans, gegenstand, C-Span, George W, Heidegger, Twin Towers Truthers—whatever you need to make it make sense. (3) Apply it to a real problem.  Welcome to use our work or yours.  A Poster Project point.  Any of our readings or cases.  Anything you just found (Elissa just sent me an article about a class action lawsuit against Nutella.  Apparently it's not health food, and apparently you can sue if you believed the ads and fattened your kids up on hazelnut chocolate.  'Who knew?'  Precisely the point: what do we know and how?....).  

In sum: extend and clarify the position Latour offers on 'critique' and its problems.  'Do you see why I'm worried?'