Latour on Critique

Latour seeks to break down the boundaries between the Thing and the object. Moving away from Heideggers’ notion of a celebrated thing, an object “cradled in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship and poetry”. Using the examples of a handmade jug and a can of Coke, Latour shows that Heidegger’s mistake is not to have treated the jug too well as a celebrated thing, but rather to draw a distinction between the two objects (or things) based on a crass prejudice. Latour says that the objects of philosophers are never complicated enough. They are not made through a complex history of new, real ad interesting participants in the universe. With this in mind, I assume that the ‘gathering’ process in ‘thinging and thing’ is the creating of a network of meaning to a prescribed object.

The realist attitude for Latour, is a necessity to bring back the relevance of the critical mind. Latour calls for a realism dealing with matters of concern, not matters of fact. He notes his mistake as viewing the critique of matters of fact as only possible by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible. The realist attitude is the addition of reality to these matters of fact, rather than the subtraction.