5 ms·

> Much of his writing resists analysis while encouraging repetition and undeformed travel. Sums it up pretty nicely. I have no clue what "undeformed travel" m

by smokel 2y ago

> Much of his writing resists analysis while encouraging repetition and undeformed travel. Sums it up pretty nicely. I have no clue what "undeformed travel" means, which is a nice reference to how his writing resists analysis. His writing does seem to encourage repetition in a lot of people who are not into logic or proper reasoning. If you say a lot, keep things extremely vague, and change definitions as you go, you attract a lot of people who think, "Hey, this is exactly what I was pondering about," but you also oppose those who think, "Hey, you are not making any sense." I tried to find a middle ground because the subject matter Latour talked about seems very important to our society, but until now, I have consistently failed to like his way of philosophizing.

currymj 2y ago
I think "undeformed travel" means that when people quote it or refer to it, they tend not to change his original words.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  Yup, I agree. Shaping is commenting there about Latour being memorably aphoristic.
dmvdoug 2y ago
Latour’s not so hard to grok, certainly much easier than the Deleuzes and Derridas of the world. Approach his work as more or less philosophical anthropology rather than, like, pure philosophy. Indeed, humans a situated in overlapping spaces and how we make meaning in those spaces is at the heart of his work, from Lab Life through Actor Network Theory. What makes him easier to grok, and set him a little bit apart, is that he steadfastly refused to deny that there was a reality other than the socially constructed ones we make/negotiate. So you have to really pay attention to particular contexts and study it very carefully in order to understand what’s happening in that space. It’s not just social constructivism all the way down. (He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)
- bananamerica 2y ago
  Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    Honestly, the only thing I really remember from reading Deleuze was giving up on trying to get what “the Fold” was.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
    Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's actually really funny (the man loved puns). There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
    - bananamerica 2y ago
      I actually read Derrida in my time with the literature department so there was no analytics vs continentals struggle going on at all.
    - dmvdoug 2y ago
      Yes, Derrida is fine if you’re just in it for wordplay. But it has always struck me that that’s about all there is to it. I don’t take him/deconstructionism seriously though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally escaped. I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
      - dmvdoug 2y ago
        By the way, I’d make a similar criticism of, for example, later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea. Sein and Zeit and his lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards—-but early Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in ways later Heidegger absolutely isn’t).
ValentinA23 2y ago
I think what bothers you is the poetical aspect of this text (in the sense of Jakobson's function of language, which boils down to, quoting wikipedia, focusing on "the message for its own sake"). This seems to fit what is said elsewhere in the article: >He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.” This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it: >The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique. Some quotes from the book [1]: >[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter. Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger. >Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way. Heidegger [1]https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Continental-Thought/dp/0253014212 https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Cont...
spython 2y ago
After having worked with Latour (for two years, on his last exhibition and my artistic research), I got the feeling that he is much more a speaking philosopher, rather than a writing one. I found his speeches easier to grok and, once I started treating his books as speeches, they too became easier to understand. Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.

by smokel 2y ago

currymj 2y ago

I think "undeformed travel" means that when people quote it or refer to it, they tend not to change his original words.

dmvdoug 2y ago
Yup, I agree. Shaping is commenting there about Latour being memorably aphoristic.

dmvdoug 2y ago

Latour’s not so hard to grok, certainly much easier than the Deleuzes and Derridas of the world. Approach his work as more or less philosophical anthropology rather than, like, pure philosophy. Indeed, humans a situated in overlapping spaces and how we make meaning in those spaces is at the heart of his work, from Lab Life through Actor Network Theory. What makes him easier to grok, and set him a little bit apart, is that he steadfastly refused to deny that there was a reality other than the socially constructed ones we make/negotiate. So you have to really pay attention to particular contexts and study it very carefully in order to understand what’s happening in that space. It’s not just social constructivism all the way down. (He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)

bananamerica 2y ago
Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  Honestly, the only thing I really remember from reading Deleuze was giving up on trying to get what “the Fold” was.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's actually really funny (the man loved puns). There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
  - bananamerica 2y ago
    I actually read Derrida in my time with the literature department so there was no analytics vs continentals struggle going on at all.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    Yes, Derrida is fine if you’re just in it for wordplay. But it has always struck me that that’s about all there is to it. I don’t take him/deconstructionism seriously though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally escaped. I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
    - dmvdoug 2y ago
      By the way, I’d make a similar criticism of, for example, later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea. Sein and Zeit and his lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards—-but early Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in ways later Heidegger absolutely isn’t).

ValentinA23 2y ago

I think what bothers you is the poetical aspect of this text (in the sense of Jakobson's function of language, which boils down to, quoting wikipedia, focusing on "the message for its own sake"). This seems to fit what is said elsewhere in the article: >He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.” This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it: >The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique. Some quotes from the book [1]: >[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter. Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger. >Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way. Heidegger [1]https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Continental-Thought/dp/0253014212 https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Cont...

spython 2y ago

After having worked with Latour (for two years, on his last exhibition and my artistic research), I got the feeling that he is much more a speaking philosopher, rather than a writing one. I found his speeches easier to grok and, once I started treating his books as speeches, they too became easier to understand. Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.