📑 A Locus of Care

Bookmarked https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/a-locus-of-care (justinehsmith.substack.com)

Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022)

Justin Smith reflects upon the legacy on Bruno Latour and his focus on the ‘matter of concern’ associated with a thing:

So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern). This is something conceptually distinct from an artefact, or from an object. In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of “objectivity” has led us (a notion that really only takes hold as a dogma in the late nineteenth century, according to Daston and Galison in their celebrated genealogy of the concept, to which Latour provided the preface in its French translation), it might be better to retrain our focus on “things”. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal. It was, recall, only in the mid-twentieth century that we got the first photographic images of our planet as the iconic “pale blue dot” that we all know, and love, today. Arguably, it is at this moment that the Earth itself became a thing, that is, came to be cognized and valued as a suitable locus of our care and solicitude, rather than simply, so to speak, the transcendent ground of our existence. This is the moment, also, when Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which so influenced Latour’s thinking, became conceivable — it is not that no one in antiquity or later had ever suggested the world is an organic whole, but what was meant by “world”, for, e.g., the Stoics, was the cosmos, and not any particular life-supporting sphere within it. In a sense Latour’s late-career emphasis on matters of concern, or, if you will, on “truth as care”, is a continuation of the early-career work for which he was admonished as a partisan of the “post-truth” tendency. But his later work is at least somewhat less playful, more urgent, and in tone it is a universe away from the perceived cynicism of the golden age of constructionist science studies. He is speaking now not in the vein of irony, but of love.

Justin E. H. Smith https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/a-locus-of-care