The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.
I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.
Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.
My kingdom for a more embodied body.
Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them.
You who are on the inside, don’t condemn my lack of faith too quickly; you who are on the outside, don’t be too quick to mock my overcredulity; you who are indifferent, don’t be too quick to wax ironic about my perpetual hesitations.
The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics.
If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.
No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.
The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it’s people to abject poverty.
Alas, the historical name is ‘actor-network-theory’, a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept.
Nancy Cartwright here in this School has written the funniest paper on scientific method ever, by taking the average advice from all the books about scientific method, and they are extreme banalities.
In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.
The difficulty lies in the very expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.
To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.
The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.
Politics is not about “freshly dead” people, but about the living ; not about ghoulish stories of the afterworld, but about gory stories of this world.
And yet, it is true that the third attractor doesn’t look very attractive. It requires too much care, too much attention, too much time, too much diplomacy. Even today it is the Global that shines, that liberates, that arouses enthusiasm, that makes it possible to remain so unaware, that emancipates, that gives the impression of eternal youth. Only it does not exist. It is the Local that reassures, that calms, that offers an identity. But it does not exist either.
But then is no one at home any longer?” No, as a matter of fact. Neither state sovereignty nor inviolable borders can take the place of politics any longer.
Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.
The hypothesis of this essay is that the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.