Bruno Latour fans will know that the French anthropologist’s long-awaited follow-up to 1991’s game-changing theoretical provocation We Have Never Been Modern was released in its English translation just a few weeks ago. The book is called An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (and is becoming better known by its acronym “AIME”), and it provides a state-of-the-art summation of Latour’s project of producing an “anthropology of the moderns” — that is, of us.
Most interestingly, it does this as a multi-phase exercise in “interactive metaphysics,” which includes a participatory online web site intended to fill in the details and elicit commentary, debate, and refinement.
Hard-core fans will also likely have heard about Adam Robbert’s online AIME research group, which will be conducting a group reading beginning next week. The group currently involving several dozen participants (including myself — so you will be hearing about it here), but it is open to the public.
While I haven’t started reading the book yet, I think it’s safe to predict that AIME and everything around is likely to become one of the most important events in nature-culture theorizing for years to come. I invite blog readers to join the discussions — here, at Adam’s group site, or on Latour’s own interactive site.
thanks, this is exciting in its potential and I have invited ANT folks worldwide so hopefully people will go beyond mere academic writing about the need to get involved and will participate in this novel effort to make things public, time will tell I suppose…
Philip Conway has already published his summary of the Introduction and of the first chapter of AIME, and the discussion has begun. I have high hopes for this endeavour. For the moment the discussion has centered on a certain vagueness and conceptual tension in Latour’s use of the term “Moderns”, and of what role his appeal to a notion of “values” plays in his project: preliminary survey to open up the field of inquiry or rhetorical reduction to serve the purposes of his own agenda. The question is thus posed of how we may best read this book, and Latour’s work in general.
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