Hearing the announcement of Bruno Latour‘s death earlier today, I remembered his visit to the Feverish World symposium, which EcoCultureLab organized in 2018 in Burlington, Vermont. Despite his health (which was turning for the worse at the time), he participated gracefully in this strange mixture of conference, festival, and street event, and gave a great closing keynote speech.
Until his death, Latour was one of the most widely cited living social scientists and philosophers in the world. He was often all too casually dismissed as a “social constructionist,” despite the fact that he took science more seriously than almost anyone (he devoted his life to understanding it), and that if there was anything he deconstructed, it was the social. Instead, he was a “constructionist” in the best sense of the word (the Whiteheadian sense): he believed that every thing is constructed — that is, shaped and fabricated — by the labor of all of the relational elements that went into producing it. He believed that “facts” and “fetishes” were not necessarily opposed to each other, but that all things were on a spectrum between the two — “factishes” that were real yet invested with different degrees of mythical power.
But all of that was preamble to the work of restoring genuine dialogue between the realms “the moderns” have separated: especially between the arts, religion, and the sciences, and especially around those things — like climate change and looming ecological catastophe — that our world seems least equipped to deal with despite having created them.
All of this, to my mind, is best represented by the exhibitions he co-curated: “Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art” (2002), “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” (2005), “Reset Modernity!” (2016), and “Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” (2020-21), which in their combined impact — as Latourian actor networks made up of artists, scientists, philosophers, and many objects of various kinds — have altered the landscape of contemporary thought more than anyone I can think of in the post-1988 climate change era (since the first major pronouncement of the reality of anthropogenic climate change).
Rest in peace, Bruno. All the debates and polemics you elicited were so very necessary.
In the picture, Latour is chatting with Rebecca Schwarz and me (Adrian Ivakhiv) at Burlington’s Hen of the Wood restaurant after a vigorous day of Feverish World.
