{"id":7008,"date":"2013-11-08T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T17:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7008"},"modified":"2013-11-08T12:03:55","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T17:03:55","slug":"reading-aime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/08\/reading-aime\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading AIME"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m just managing to keep up with the Latour\/AIME<\/a> reading groups (both the one on my campus and the online one<\/a> organized by Adam Robbert et al.), but not so much with the commentaries. Here’s my first brief reflection on the book…<\/em><\/p>\n

1. You know that a scholar has made it to the top of the French academic heap when he can publish a 500-page book that lacks a single bibliographic reference.<\/p>\n

2. That said, the references are evident for longtime readers of Latour, as the book is a culmination of work he’s been doing in various venues for a quarter-century or more. I’m thinking less of his work in science and technology studies, the field in which he’s best known, than in everything else, including his scattered writings on religion, psychology, ecology, cosmopolitics, his curatorial work (like Iconoclash<\/a> and Making Things Public<\/a>), and so on.<\/p>\n

Here and there certain authors pop out into the light from out of their black boxes (Souriau in particular). But others that have made up the constellations of the Latourian night sky — Tarde, Stengers, Whitehead, Serres, Greimas, Garfinkel,\u00a0 Simondon, Deleuze, his anthropologist colleagues (Descola, Viveiros de Castro), his primatologist friends (Strum and Haraway, though they haven’t popped up yet), and of course his many allies and interlocutors in STS and ANT — are gestured toward or hinted at as well.<\/p>\n

3. As a culmination, AIME<\/em> is both tremendously synthetic — the first systematic exposition of the complete system of “modes of inquiry” — and veiled in a strange (and very French, very rhetorical) language. Latour makes us work<\/em> at reading this book, and it isn’t easy. This is certainly not going to be a straight description of the ontologically pluralist universe he’s trying to circumscribe, no: it will take effort, and tools. It is taking some figuring out, on his part: how to describe things, how to nudge us (or bludgeon us) into following him, what tools and objects to throw down — like the metal nuts that the Stalker in Tarkovsky’s Zone throws down — to test out the solidity of the ground we are about to walk on.<\/p>\n